Netflix

I have a testimony of Netflix. First of all, it's pretty much one of the coolest ideas ever conceived. "Let's rent DVDs to people through the mail. And we'll let them keep them for as long as they want and they won't even have to pay postage to send them back." Brilliant, I tell you! I thoroughly dislike paying to mail stuff, I hate rushing to get DVDs back to the rental place on time, and I'm also unbelievably lazy, which means more often than not, I'd rather sit on the couch and flip through channels while thinking about possibly getting up and going to the video rental place. Seriously, this is really a no-brainer for me or any of my fellow self-enforced shut-ins.

Netflix also shamelessly sucks up to my frugality (read: unbelievable cheapness). For around $12.50 a month, I get two movies at a time with no limit to how many I can get. I've tapered off to about eight a month, but for the first three or four months of my subscription I'm pretty sure I was costing Netflix money. I could easily breeze through twenty-four DVDs a month, especially when I was on a TV series run: Battlestar Galactica, Freaks and Geeks, you name it. I'd come home from work and chug through a DVD a night. Thanks to Netflix, I no longer need to see movies in the theater. If I saw something that looked interesting but I knew I could wait to see, I would just log it away in my subconcious and then add it to my Netflix queue when it came out on DVD. Considering that it will run you about $8.50 to go the movies, $12.50 a month for unlimited movies is a downright steal. And unlike going to the movies, if my Netflix movie is crap, I don't mind so much because it really probably only cost me about a buck to watch.

Along with their too-good-to-be-true price, Netflix also has unbelievable service. Since Netflix has a mailing center right in Salt Lake, I can return movies and get two new ones in their place in exactly three days. If I mail movies on Monday, I'll get the replacements on Wednesday. Not as fast as going to the video store, but I'm lazy and don't have any desire to see what lies beyond my mailbox anyway. If you find yourself in that one awkward day between movie deliveries, they also have a bazillion movies available to stream online, which I have done before. It's not as satisfying as watching a DVD, but it probably would have been if I had had cables to hook up my laptop to my TV. That and if the movie hadn't sucked. (Rachie does NOT recommend La vie en rose, about the life of French singer Edith Piaf.)

Mailing fragile DVDs through the mail in nothing but a flimsy envelope, it's inevitable that you're going to get a scraped or broken DVD. I once received a DVD that was split down the middle on one side. Already upset that I was going to have to wait for my next installment of Battlestar Galactia, I dreaded contacting customer support because I thought they would try to blame me for the broken movie or make me wait until they received the faulty DVD before they mailed out the replacement. Neither was true. I notified customer service of the broken DVD. They apologized for the inconvenience and immediately shipped the replacement. That was where they had me. I hadn't had to talk to a person and I was getting gratification as instantaneously as possible. Love it.

Netflix also offers a neat little networking tool where you can link up with friends and see what each other has in their queues. I like the idea in theory but will probably never participate in it myself because I don't need people seeing that I watched something like Nanny McPhee. Sure it was delightful, but what's it going to do to my street cred?

And so I heartily endorse Netflix for both personal use and as a gift. I have given limited subscriptions to friends and family for birthdays and holidays, and many even opted to sign up as regular customers because they like it so much. I really can't think of a downside to Netflix unless you just have no patience at all or you think your OnDemand will cover all your movie-watching needs, to which I ask, Does OnDemand have the 80s cartoon series Jem? Because Netflix does. And it's next in my queue.