Netflix Profiles

My wife and I have been Netflix customers for about a half dozen years. We have used the four movie at a time plan. With Profiles, this gives us two movies each and our own separate queues. This works well because our DVD tastes differ. Sometimes one of us will be working through many disks to catch up on a TV series, while the other just wants to watch a movie. Profiles have allowed for this.

About a week and a haf ago the folks at Netflix sent out an email saying: "We wanted to let you know we will be eliminating Profiles, the feature that allowed you to set up separate DVD Queues under one account, effective September 1, 2008." And apparently this was being done to, "improve the Netflix website".

My immediate reaction upon reading this email was to call Netflix at about 11:00 at night (seems they are there 24 hours a day) and cancel our membership, while pointing to the email as the cause for the decision. It seems that others had the same reaction and Netflix has changed their mind.

Yesterday Netflix sent out an email saying, "You spoke, and we listened. We are keeping Profiles. Thank you for all the calls and emails telling us how important Profiles are. We are sorry for any inconvenience we may have caused. We hope the next time you hear from us we will delight, and not disappoint, you."

Looks like I can join Netflix again and continue with my plans to purchase the Netflix Player by Roku and then happily begin streaming content from the Netflix website to my TV. Of course I do feel a little sad at this point, now having realizing that my product loyalty is only one bad policy decision away from non-existent.

The Joys of Upgrading

I have been teetering at the brink of upgrading my home computer for a while now. This has mostly been due to the amount of noise that my current system generates (loud fans), but that wasn't quite enough to make me do it.

It is the streaming video problems that have finally sent me to upgrade-land. Both Netflix and Joost hang on my current machine. As both of these apps seem pretty popular, I have come to the conclusion that my issues with them are more likely caused by the hardware that I am using.

The machine that I have been using for a couple of years is an AMD Athlon 2200+ (1.8 GHz), with 1 GB Ram, a GeForce FX 5200 w/128 MB Ram, and a 100 GB IDE Hard Drive.

I thought that this would be fast enough to run streaming video. Turns out that I was wrong.

With this in mind, I am doing an immediate "eBay upgrade" of used parts from various sellers. This "new to me" machine will be a AMD Athlon 64 3500+ (2.2 GHz), 1 GB Ram, a ATI Radeon 9600 w/128 MB Ram, and a 200 GB SATA Hard Drive. Total cost here is about $200. This machine should provide a noticeable difference in video quality, but it will still be loud and out-of-date.

Once the "eBay upgrade" is done, I need to begin exploring a proper upgrade to a quiet machine with passive cooling, at least dual core CPU, and a PCI Express video card.

Netflix & Connection Speed

I am pleased with the fact that Netflix is slowly adding movies to their Watch Now collection. Initially it seemed like the only real choices were between a few aging BBC favorites and The Philadelphia Experiment 2. It is starting to become a place where I might actually be able to use the 24 hours of on-demand time that they have allotted me.

When trying to watch some of this newer content, I have run into an interesting issue. When I try to play a popular movie like The Core, it plays without issue. It takes less that a minute and then just loads right up. When trying to watch a less popular title, in this case The Girl from Monday, I get an error message from Netflix that prompts, "Your Internet Connection is too slow for immediate playback."

This message makes me wonder if Netflix is just missing an error message for, "Sorry this movie is not available right now" or are they actually expecting the average internet user to be browsing in with a download speed of greater than 6 Mb/s. If so, it would be nice if they could tell me just what speed they are looking for. I would really like to know.

Maybe I am overestimating what my cable modem is capable of. I know that there are others with faster connections. Personall I am eagerly awaiting the arrival of Verizon's Fios service so that I can double my current browsing speed. But in the meantime, if my present download speed is good enough to plays just about everything else on the site, why should I be getting this prompt at all?