柏忠毅的 'the Daily Biff' - Product Review: Netflix

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Wed, 13 Jan 2010

Product Review: Netflix
Not long ago, Netflix became available on the PS3. I had been looking forward to its arrival since we bought the PS3 in early 2008. We signed up immediately. In December, we gave Netflix a trial run (and kept our Blockbuster Total Access account active just in case). The cost for the Netflix service is just a bit more than the equivalent Blockbuster plan. It would be the same rate except that Netflix imposes a surcharge for access to Blu-Ray discs (Why?).

The "by mail" service that both Netflix and Blockbuster offer is pretty much exactly the same. The Netflix turnaround times are quite fast... on the order of 3 postal service days. I'm not going to miss driving over to Klahanie to exchange our movies for the free rentals. We'll get just as many movies by mail from Netflix as we would from Blockbuster (we average about 4 per month), so we aren't losing anything there. What we are gaining is the Netflix instant streaming service. It really isn't as great as it could be, but it is good enough. About 95% of the movies available instantly on Netflix are utter crap, but there is still has enough options to keep us entertained. The fact that the streaming is available on both the PS3 and any computer in our house is just icing on the cake. I use this feature all the time.

I do like the web interface at Blockbuster better than the one at Netflix. The advanced search and sorting features at Blockbuster made it very nice to find a lot of movies that I would be interested in. With Netflix there is much more reliance on computer-derived "suggestions" than I would like. Also, why are there not any "search by genre" methods available. When I searched "Christmas" in Netflix, I'm given a list of results of movies whose title includes the word "Christmas". Over at Blockbuster, they just had a "Christmas" genre button I could click and get a list of pretty much every movie pertaining to Christmas under the sun. I could then sort the results based on release date or rating and easily find something to watch. With Netflix, it's an exercise in bashing your head against the wall it seems. I hope this part of the Netflix experience improves... sooner rather than later.

But all in all, we are very pleased with the new service. We terminated our Blockbuster account this month and I doubt we will renew it.

:: Posted by rus on Wed, 13 Jan 2010 11:32 pm
:: Filed under /reviews/products

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