Netflix Rules of Efficiency
If you’re on any sort of unlimited plan with Netflix, be it 2-movies-at-a-time, 3-at-a-time, or even just the unlimited streaming plans, you need to do a little basic math. How many movies do you have to watch per month before the plans are just not worth it economically?
Third-party apps like Feedfliks can help in this regard — they’ll track how often you’re renting/returning movies and figure out roughly how much you’re paying in terms of dollars per movie. For example, based on recent stats I’m paying $0.26 per movie — but that includes instant viewing. The average time I keep a dvd at home is 13 days, which is far too long; all told I’m paying roughly $3-4 per dvd I watch at home. That’s far more than I’d pay to do a Redbox rental for each recent-release DVD I’m interested in.
The problem with Redbox as a replacement for Netflix at-home dvd delivery is that Redbox won’t have TV series and specialty shows that I’m interested in — they pretty much have recent-run movies and some games, and that’s about it (which makes sense given their economic model). But if I want to rent Mad Men, then it’s pretty much Netflix (Blockbuster locations aren’t likely to have what I want, either). So, I stick with the 2-dvd/mo. plan on Netflix, and focus the queue tightly to make sure I only get what I want to watch. Then, I will start imposing The Netflix Rules of Efficiency:
1. No DVD stays at home longer than 10 days.
2. DVDs I rent but return unwatched disappear forever from the queue.
3. Add as much as I want to the Streaming queue, but don’t have anything in both streaming and DVD queues.
4. For TV series, try to borrow them from friends, etc. rather than get them from Netflix, so as to keep the queue moving.
5. For odd new releases, consider Redbox instead.
What are your Netflix rules?
Posted on January 31, 2011, in Pop Culture. Bookmark the permalink. 53 Comments.
Steve Evans
RJH
Scott B.
John C.
Susan M
Aaron Brown
ninemoons
John Harrison
kulturblogadmin
Kyle M
Brad
KulturBlogGuest
MCQ
Wm
Rebecca
Ivan
Geoff J
btdgreg
Clark Goble
Aaron R.
Tim J
Ben
Marcus
Brad Williams
gibsonbn
I’ve been on the 3-disc plan since I first signed up a long time ago. But I hardly ever watch discs anymore. We’ve been sitting on discs for a long time. On the other hand, my whole family streams shows on a regular basis: daily or sometimes more. I’m toying with the idea of getting a new TV (we’re a one set family so far), and Netflix built in is a requirement for making that purchase because I’d rather not deal with yet another set-top-box (i.e., Roku or a BlueRay player).
I’m seriously thinking about changing to the one-disc + streaming plan. One drawback that isn’t totally obvious is that your streaming capabilities are limited by the number of discs selected by your plan. So if, for example, my kids want to stream Doctor Who in the family room via our Wii, and I want to watch Buffy season four on a second set, I have to have at least a two-disc plan to have access to both at the same time.
I’ve used Redbox a few times, and it works for getting a new release movie on a Saturday night, but the selection is never all that great if you want something outside the mainstream, or TV shows.
It also appears that Amazon Prime may be giving some competition to Netflix streaming. This could be an interesting game-changer.
If you’re paying $3-4 per DVD, yet $0.26 per movie overall, you must stream a boatload of movies.
I pretty much just do what my wife says. As with everything.
We usually turn around the actual DVD’s in a couple of days. Netflix is almost making TV obsolete in our house. Maybe that could become part of the efficiency.
i do a lot of RRR (rent, rip, return) w/ netflix. it keeps your queue moving, but now i probably have 50 movies i’ve yet to watch sitting on my hdd. so now it’s probably time to drop down to 1 movie at a time until i catch up.
netflix just can’t be beat as far as the variety of available content goes. they pretty much have everything you’d want to watch. right now there really is no viable competitor out there, which is why they’re cleaning up. but i feel like there’s a lot going on in that arena and that the whole landscape could be different in just a few years.
#3 seems to require more effort than is necessary – if a movie is in your dvd queue, then suddenly gets added to the library of online capable – it will automatically appear in your streaming queue.
We’ve been a 1 dvd-at-a-time family for years. And we stream like crazy. Between Netflix and PlayOn on XBox (Hulu, CBS, ESPN3, MTV, etc. for those who aren’t familiar) – cable/satelite tv has always been irrelevant for us. Especially now that we can get free HDTV over the air for things like GC or the Superbowl.
I’ve been thinking of cancelling cable for a while, but I still use it regularly for sports and some new TV shows.
We use Netflix, Hulu and Xfinity (and sometimes iTunes) for everything else though, and cable time is pretty minimal compared to those.
I love that we can stream movies from Netflix onto our big screen TV.
We usually just get one disk at a time and keep it only a couple of days, but we stream a lot more stuff than we get on disk. By far.
We do the 1-disc plan, and lots of streaming. Whenever a disc comes, I rip it and send it back the same day, watch it at my leisure, and then delete it. Lots of Hulu, too, though this new Hulu+ thing kinda sucks. No more V, other stuff only available through + or at the originating network’s page.
What do you guys use to rip?
Hulu is dead, btw.
“Hulu is dead, btw.”
Dying, but not dead. As long as I can still get my Modern Family and Community, it’s not dead.
That seems unreasonably harsh. I have returned discs a few times simply because, between the time the disc arrived and the time I would have watched it normally, I got excited about something else and didn’t want to wait–this happens most frequently with TV series. It has nothing to do with the worthiness of the disc itself, but only with my impatience in dealing with cliffhanger episodes.
1. Handbrake–best thingy ever.
2. Mac The Ripper–best thingy ever if Handbrake wasn’t around.
Your mac technologies are dead to me.
Scott, I play hardball.
Sorry, SG. Until you somehow graduate to a big-kid computer, maybe what you could do is send me your discs and I could take care of them for you. Include envelopes for return shipping, okay? You should see something back in 4-6 weeks.
I have a one disc plus streaming account. I also pay a little more to get blue-ray discs. I stream like crazy and w use Roku, which is a great value in my opinion. The box is so small that it doesn’t clutter things up, and they have aggressively created an entire line-up of channels in addition to Netflix. It’s worth the investment and then some.
I use the by mail discs almost exclusively to get hard-to-find classic or foreign films. The rarer titles that you can’t find at Redbox, which I’ve used before, but don’t care for because the selection is fairly crappy most of the time.
I check out a website called instantwatcher.com daily. It’s a great tool for avid Netflix users because it will show you which instant titles are new, which titles are coming up, and which titles are soon to expire.
I also try to exercise enought discipline to limit my watch instantly cue to about 50 titles. Since, I’m interested in watching nearly everything it’s not easy, but it otherwise I’d have hundreds of titles on my list.
Brian G,
I had never heard of instantwatcher.com until you just mentioned it. From the very bottom of my heart, THANK YOU.
Yeah, it is an amazing site. For Netflixheads it is a godsend.
Why is Hulu dead? I still use it to watch many shows that I miss during the week, plus older shows that I never got a chance to watch before. There are still a lot of shows that don’t require a subscription to Hulu plus. Seems to me that Hulu plus is trying to be like Netflix, except focused on TV rather than movies. It gets TV shows a long time before Netflix does, so I could see myself subscribing to Hulu plus instead of paying for cable at some point.
Hulu is dying because it’s major media partners are having big disagreements about the whole project. I’ll see if I can dig up the article I read on this recently.
Here we go: http://on.wsj.com/gdpOMW
I blame Netflix for my lack of interest in movies.
Not dead then.
1. Streaming is largely worthless. As I’ve said before the vast majority of movies on my queue aren’t available for streaming. It’s fine for a quick “hold their attention” for the kids. But not for me.
2. I rent ‘em and rip ‘em. Right now I have a 3 movie queue but I can save them up until I actually have time to watch them on my computer or Apple TV. Really though the 3-disc membership is too many. I still have such a backlog… And most of the discs sit around too long. I’ve taken to just putting kids shows on the list.
3. Hulu is dead because almost nothing is available on the basic site and the Hulu Plus site keeps adds. So you’re paying nearly as much as Netflix to be able to watch ads. Really. I think a lot of people would do Hulu in place of a DVR if (a) it had better selection and (b) it skipped the ads.
4. The main reason folks aren’t abandoning cable/sat is because of sports and news.
5. There’s about to be a major fight with the various ISPs over bandwidth. You have a lot of folks who want streaming to come and ISPs want a bigger cut of the pie. Now that one of the nation’s bigger cable companies owns NBC this really makes things trickier since they can simply take down a lot of content. It’ll be interesting seeing how things play out.
6. I’m just too busy to watch a lot of movies or TV. It’s easy not to when there’s just not that many must watch shows. Seriously I’ve only seen a few movies this year and I don’t exactly feel like I’m missing a lot. (Other than True Grit. I want to see True Grit.)
Most of the movies I watch on Netflix are streamed, Clark, so I don’t get why you say it’s worthless. I guess if all you want to watch are the lates studio releases, then it would be worthless, but I like to watch a lot of indie flicks, so for me it’s great.
MCQ, dead as a social phenomenon. Dead as in its momentum is gone.
Clark is right on in his #3-5.
McQ few of my queue are latest releases. Most are quasi-indie, old TV or older movies. If theyvwere all recent hits I could understand. When most are 2 years older it’s harder to understand.
feedfliks says I keep Movies on average 8 days, but I am mostly full of stuff for the kids, as we don’t do cable. On the 2disc plan, feedfliks says I am at .16 a dvd for instant and $2.12 for disc. More interesting is that I am doing 79.7 Instant shows a month, compared to 6.3 DVDs. Personally, I think I let the kids watch to much tv, but hey, the ROI is pretty good. The “Use Netflix and Redbox” strategy is silly because it only increases cost if you are going for high ROI. I guess if you are going for more immediate gratification, it’s a different story, but you could have gotten that by going to the theater in the first place.
“6. I’m just too busy to watch a lot of movies or TV. It’s easy not to when there’s just not that many must watch shows. Seriously I’ve only seen a few movies this year and I don’t exactly feel like I’m missing a lot. (Other than True Grit. I want to see True Grit.)”
I don’t know what constitutes “must see” for you, but it seems like theres some pretty decent programming out there on television, and it has been a pretty good year for movies too (particularly hidden gems like How to Train your Dragon and Easy A).
Not sure what you’re looking for.
How to Train Your Dragon was cute and Kick Ass was enjoyable (although I saw it months after it was released). I liked Inception but there just haven’t been a lot of the sorts of movies I really dig. We’ll see about this year. It could be a great year or a horrible year depending upon how Aliens vs. Cowboys, Thor, Captain America and so forth all do. (I know I’ll hate Transformers)
I was able to avoid Trannys2 altogether. I can make SoBe bombs in my backyard for free. http://www.myspace.com/video/vid/8037539
I don’t have a huge need to spend $18 to go watch Michael Bay make them.
“depending upon how Aliens vs. Cowboys, Thor, Captain America and so forth all do. (I know I’ll hate Transformers)”
Really? If those are you’re test cases I think you’re in for a disappointing year.
Perhaps. I’m hoping not. There’s a few others such as the fourth Pirates movie (we’ll see). Then there’s a new X-Men (we’ll see). Green Lantern (I’ll be it sucks). Cars 2.
But yes, I’m expecting to be disappointed.
My four favorite movies from 2010 I hadn’t even heard of in 2009. I’m hoping the same is true for 2011.
Rather than Netflix, I use CafeDVD because it’s the only company I know that does per disc rentals instead of monthly plans. I don’t watch that much, and I dislike assuming monthly bills. Disc rentals cost $3.40 each. The company says it wants them back in eight days, but I usually keep them for a couple months without any problem. Every three months or so, I’ll order two or three. Once I kept an order for about three months, and CafeDVD sent an e-mail asking when I would return them. Not everything I might want is available, but a lot of good stuff is.
Hulu should have kept giving it away until they had a viable plan for monetization. Instead they clamped down the service without a clue as to how to proceed.
They could have put themselves in a positio to computer with Netflix.
Did they really clamp down on that much? I still watch most of the shows I watch on hulu for free. I guess I don’t watch that much, but it’s at least 5 or so shows a week.
The biggest thing for me was losing Comedy Central content – Daily Show and South Park – when they lost that, my Hulu viewing dropped 75%
Interesting links. Apparently I pay .12 per movie, which is pretty decent when compared to the dark ages back when I rented from stupid Blockbuster.
I got some good news for you B.Russ: http://mashable.com/2011/02/02/viacom-hulu/
Yeah, not sure what you’re talking about B.Russ. Daily Show and South Park are both on hulu for free.
MCQ – they hadn’t been since March 2010, apparently they are just now coming back (at least, according to the article WM linked)
In the meantime I’ve just streamed directly from ComCent, so it hasn’t really changed much for me, just that my actual Hulu viewership dropped significantly when they left.
I’d be happier if I could stream Colbert and the Daily Show to my TV.
arJ – all you need is an xbox/PS3/Wii and PlayOn – http://www.playon.tv/playon
Yeah, it works great. I stream netflix to my TV all the time.
I have none of those items. I can hook up my laptop to the TV but that is a bit of a pain. I do have an AppleTV and stream Netflix to it but no Hulu/ComCen. Frankly I’m even more upset that I can’t stream them on the iPad, which is just about for watching stuff in bed.
Apparently iPad is also a “supported device” for PlayOn. I don’t have an iPad, so I can’t speak to it’s efficacy, but you might want to check it out.
Hulu has an iPad version. (Just checked) There’s also a Netflix version for the iPhone and iPad.
Interestingly the comments for the Hulu app demonstrate its problem. $8 a month for ads. To be fair I think the networks are thinking how much they get for cable TV (which also has ads). However people are comparing it to other services on computers and remembering how they can skip ads with a DVR. (And also noticing the content that is on their cable or sat but not on Hulu)
So…. Play On costs $40 but the content might get pulled at any moment? Am I missing something here?
Oh, and I need to run Windows? Not happening.
Now you have the perfect excuse to get an Xbox 360.
“So…. Play On costs $40 but the content might get pulled at any moment? Am I missing something here?”
Yup, it costs the same as a month of cable, and has continually added content over the two years I’ve owned it. . . Don’t think you’re missing anything.
I am missing a Windows PC to run it through.