Tuesday, January 29, 2013

Goodbye Netflix

I finally dropped Netflix.

Okay, I still have Netflix, but streaming only. I dropped the disk service.

A lot of people got all upset with Netflix a year and a half ago when they dropped the bundle package. That's where you could get streaming and disks for something like $10/month. When they did away with the bundling, the cost of streaming and disk went up $6 month. And a lot of people were really ticked off. I wasn't. I expected it. I knew streaming was the future and that disks were becoming a drain.

I kept the service because it was the only way to watch some movies. You see, not everything Netflix carries is in their streaming catalog. Some movies and TV shows are only available on disk. And, I had a lot of stuff in my DVD queue, so I kept the disk service.

A few months ago, I asked myself, I said, "Self, how many of those movies or TV shows do you really want to watch?" And the answer was, "About half."

So, the one's I didn't care to watch, I removed. Some had come available on streaming and I put those in my streaming queue. And, some were actually available on Amazon Prime (got that for shipping years ago; Amazon added some video streaming content a year or two ago), and those I added to my Amazon Instant Video Watchlist.

This past month, the DVDs in the queue got down to a small number, and I canceled the service. They continued to send DVDs in the queue until the service month was up. Well, it's up. And I no longer get DVDs from Netflix. There were five DVDs in the queue when the cancellation took effect. The fact that I don't even remember what they were means it won't be a great loss.

Still, I think I'll miss my DVDs. Of course, I also miss my Tandy 1000 computer, but wouldn't trade my MacBook Pro for it.

Now, I no longer have to walk all the way over to the TV to put a disk into the DVD player. And, if I'm sitting on the couch eating a sammich when I want to watch a movie, I no longer have to worry about getting mayonnaise on the disk.

The Roku remote could use a cleaning, though.

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