Netflix and the politics of it

Netflix is a DVD rental service over here. You choose your movies online, and they get delivered in the mail. Netflix has been fabulous - we watch so many more movies now, and the website gives recommendations based on what you've liked (you rate movies you'v watched), and movies similar to ones you've looked at.

Whenever we went to a movie store, we would forget what we wanted to see, or wouldn't want to spend the money on a movie that only looked kinda interesting, a TV series because it'd cost a fortune to watch the whole series, or an old movie that we just hadn't seen in ages.

So now our movie queue is about 120 long and includes seasons of shows we like or didn't get to see such as Desperate Housewives and Taken, old favourites like Goonies, Gremlins and Who Framed Roger Rabbit, even older classics like Gone with the Wind, silly ones like Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, Spaceballs and Waynes World, documentaries that look interesting, and then of course recent releases. The other thing we really like is that if something is out at the movies but we don't think we'll get time to see it, or if it looks interesting, but not something we feel the need to seeon the big screen, we put it straight into the queue, so when it's released on DVD we can watch it.

We've had a lot of fun finding movies to put in the queue! It also means politics of what is watched. For example - I was just put through Romper Stomper which is wayyyyy too violent for my tastes, so I got to bump up the Nanny Diaries (a cute looking rom-com). When we were watching Desperate Housewives and Taken after my surgery, we alternated between one of mine, and one of Andrews to keep it fair :-)

The quality of the service is so much better than the Blockbuster equivalent we trialled in Australia which constantly lost DVDs, sent us broken DVDs, or were such bad quality they were unplayable on our older DVD player. Australia better have something better set up by the time we get home!