Tag: Netflix

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By now, you’ve heard that Netflix is splitting their business in two: one for streaming movies over the internet, which will keep the name, and one for renting DVDs by mail, which will be called Qwikster. Here are links to several funny (and a couple of serious) takes on the situation.

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Over on another blog, I noted that Netflix’s new DVD name Qwikster sounded familiar. I got some support requests and a small spam run, including this comment:

I keep getting these creepy late-night phone calls from the CEO of Netflix saying that no one else is ever going to love me like he does.

Why do I get the feeling that someone read Woot’s parody of the post?

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Dairy farms get together to raise prices, putting the squeeze on your local grocery store. The local store raises their prices to cover their higher costs. People blame the grocery store.

Then the grocery store responds by spinning off a separate store. One store will only sell milk in cardboard cartons and cheese. The other store will only sell milk in plastic bottles or yogurt. This is, of course, to make your life easier.

Of course, there’s always The Oatmeal’s explanation.

Brion adds:

One store pipes fresh delicious milk direct to your faucets, but only carries 1% because the dairy cartel is being paid by another grocery chain for an exclusive right to whole, skim, and 2%.

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A few weeks ago I decided to try out Netflix’s Watch Instantly service by watching Stan Lee’s Lightspeed, the made-for-TV movie about a government agent turned super-speedster. It’s been on my queue for a while, and I figured I’d free up the slot for something else.

Ultimately, I was really impressed — with the service. The image and sound were very clear, and the movement smooth, even with the window playing fullscreen. I don’t think I noticed a single glitch through the entire 90 minutes. I am annoyed that it’s both Windows-only and and Internet Explorer–only, which is why it’s taken so long to try it out…but aside from that, the only thing I really missed was fine control over fast-forward and rewind.

I kind of expected it to open in a separate window, rather than in the browser, but there’s a button to make it full screen, and it automatically adjusts the video size to fit the window.

The movie itself? Not so much. It was cheesy and — worse — dull. I took a break halfway through and wasn’t sure I really cared about coming back to finish it. Heatstroke was better — and I mean that. I’ve posted a review of Lightspeed over at my Flash blog, Speed Force.

I’ve since watched one more movie through the service, The Evil Dead, which wasn’t quite as good in terms of picture quality. It was blurrier, and compression artifacts were very noticeable in darker scenes. I expect a lot of that is just due to the age of the film: it was done in 1981, and who knows when the digital transfer was made. Plus of course 90% of the movie takes place at night.