Movie Hound's Heaven: Netflix Delivers

Everyone that knows me knows that I have an opinion on almost everything. Being a somewhat cynical and quite untrusting person, that opinion is often negative, especially when it involves businesses. For the most part I believe that businesses promise the world and deliver the minimum for as much money as they can get from us.

However, I do occasionally find a business that not only meets, but even exceeds, my expectations. Netflix has become one of those rare businesses for me. I have been a customer of Netflix for about 3 years now and I must admit that I have never had any serious issues with them. Now, I know your first thought (you cynic), no, this is not a paid testimonial in any way. I don't care much for paid testimonials. Always one is left to wonder if the person really loved it and just happened to get offered money to tell people, or if the money came first. Either way, it casts enough suspicion in my mind that I don't trust much of what is said anyway.

For those of you that don't know, Netflix is essentially a 'virtual' movie store. They refer to it as an "online" store, but essentially the only thing that you have to do online is set up your queue (the list of movies, in order, that you want to have sent to you). You do have an option of watching movies directly on your computer if you want, but I'll get to that later. Once you have signed on and set up your queue, that's it, now just wait for your movies in the mail. Of course the time it takes depends upon where you live, but Netflix claims to have over 100 shipping centers and 90% of their customers receive their movies within a business day of shipping. Where I live, I usually get my movies within a day of shipping. The movies come in special envelopes that also act as the return envelope for when you're ready to ship it back. You can watch the movie as many times as you want, for as long as you want. I once had a movie that my son fell in love with and we kept it for almost 6 months. The only thing Netflix did was to send me an email about 4 months after I received it 'just to assure that there is no problem and you still have' the movie. In other words, they wanted to make sure that it hadn't got lost in the mail. That was it, no 'please return it' or late fees or anything. Whenever you're ready, put the movie back into the return pouch and put it in the mail. It's pre-addressed and pre-stamped. In a couple of days, you'll get the next movie on your list.

Over the last 3 or so years, my family and I have rented just under 400 movies through the mail. At the 3 per month unlimited price plan of $16.99/month for 42 months, that's $713.58, or approximately $1.78 per movie. There has never been a late charge (there are none). Out of the 400 movies that have been sent to my mailbox, approximately 4 or 5 of them were broken or otherwise unplayable ( 1%), these were immediately returned and replaced, no fees, no question, no problems.

Netflix advertises over 10,000 movies in stock; this includes movies, documentaries, TV shows, concerts, cartoons etc. Recently, they have introduced the ability to watch movies over the Internet by downloading them directly to your computer. Obviously you need a broadband connection, but if you have one, all but the lowest priced plan offers unlimited viewing of downloaded movies. This is my one and only real complaint with them. Eventually, the rumor is, Netflix plans to move more of its business to the 'instant online' format, from recent events even streaming the movies to your TV. At the moment though, the movies available for 'instant' viewing are extremely limited in number and consist of a lot of junk that no one wants anyway. I assume that they will work to upgrade the selection as they trend more and more this way.