Gadget Use: Roku Netflix Player

Getting The Girl a Roku for her birthday comes from the multiple times I've stumbled into the living room to watch her relaxing to some afternoon Comedy Central matinee. If you're lucky in such a situation, it's Half Baked playing for the 100th time and if you are aren't, it may be some odd amalgamation of B-List actors who, at as we suspect, got stuck in a coffee shop together one day and decided to make a movie for fifty bucks and a pizza.

It's not that she doesn't have good taste, it's just that she isn't normally allowed access to the kinds of movies and TV she likes and I could honestly skip. Roku solves that by giving us direct access into her Netflix Instant Watch queue (and Amazon On Demand as well).

Setup is about as easy as it could possibly be - plug it in, follow the wizard and enter the Roku code into your Netflix account. Voila, your list appears. You still need to manage your list online, but it isn't much of a bother. When we first played it, we couldn't seem to get more than two out of four dots of quality. Which when you're watching Tango and Cash, isn't really all that bad.

Eventually, though, the quality seemed to magically fix itself and soon she was watching her Irish soap opera at pretty much DVD quality. Since then, we've only had a couple of hangups. One - a later disc of said Irish soap opera seems to have been poorly encoded by Netflix and the audio is completely off. We reported it via Netflix and I'll be interested to see what the turnaround is for getting it fixed.

Then, we were watching Vantage Point and at one spot the player kept insisting it needed to download more, and then play a bit, and then start downloading again. Bit like a skipping record. Pretty easily fixed, though, we just bounced out of the film and back in - and the rest was fine.

So pretty high marks all in all. There are always going to be foibles with online delivery, but so far the Roku belongs way up there (and certainly deserves its own niche in the recent "Your TV Watching Options" post).

Netflix taxes Blu-ray users 20%

Seriously?

You are receiving this email because you added unlimited Blu-ray access to your account for $1 a month. The number of Blu-ray titles has increased significantly and will continue to do so. As we buy more, you are able to choose from a rapidly expanding selection of Blu-ray titles. And as you've probably heard, Blu-ray discs are substantially more expensive than standard definition DVDs.

As a result, the monthly charge for Blu-ray access is increasing for most plans and will now vary by plan. The charge for monthly Blu-ray access on your 5 DVDs at-a-time (Unlimited) plan will increase from $1 a month to $6 a month. The price of your 5 DVDs at-a-time (Unlimited) plan is not changing and remains at $29.99

It comes out to about a 20% hike across the account, so the more discs you can have a month - the more you pay. I just had a long post I deleted detailing the math on it, but the short version is that if all of Netflix's 7.5 million users or so switched to Blu-Ray, Netflix could easily buy over a million Blu-ray discs a month without losing a dime. I suppose I could see Netflix's point if they had a large amount of 8 disc/month types planning to go all Blu-ray, but considering we're 5 discers and we usually have only one out of five being one with blue label, I'd say that's unlikely.

Short, short version: Netflix is heavily covering their costs here, and their power users will be shouldering most of it. It stinks, it's infuriating - but there's not much we can really do about it. The moment The Girl logs into Netflix and finds her Watch Instantly gone, she'd probably file for divorce.

Which is the real battle here. Netflix would love to kill physical distribution. But I still say, I love me my Blu-ray. I prefer the quality well over the convenience of distribution, and since I don't see my bandwidth increasing by tenfold any day soon - I don't think that's going to change.

Why Exactly Does Netflix Hate Blu-Ray So Much?

OK, so I already complained about the tax Netflix has levied for renting Blu-Ray movies. They're more expensive, it's more manpower to sort, it requires yada yada yada whatever. Don't care. Paid it.

But why did they have to break the setup on their site? When I first set my account up for Blu-Ray, it offered and then subsequently updated any film in my Popcorn profile to the format. Perfect. Simple and easy. Was happy as a clam.

When the tax hit, they removed all the preferences. Everything reverted to DVD. I tried to update the profile, but was told I had to do it in the master account. I did that, and told the master account to choose Blu-ray over DVD.

Not only did this decision not descend down to the profiles, but the profiles were automatically set to "let me choose the format". Which I could not actually do since there was no dropdown to do just that. So then I went into the profile itself and was now able to tell it to choose Blu-Ray instead of DVD - which it also did not do. Instead, now I got the drop down where I could chose the format - but that format defaults to DVD.

Excuse me - I'm paying extra so that I can have worse service than I was getting for free. Anyone want to send the clue train over to Netflixville? I think it missed the stop.

It does at least now add new movies in Blu-Ray, but still - annoying.

Truly annoying.

Netflix has a Blu-Ray Tax?

When adding Blu-Ray to our Television queue at Netflix for the first time, we got a message saying it would cost an additional $1.00 a month:



Seems odd - a Blu-Ray disc is exactly as easy to stuff into an envelope as a DVD. Is it the extra cost of the format itself? The cost of having a framework for deciding between the formats versus the lack of adoption?

Netflix Backs Down, Keeps Profiles

Just arrived in the inbox:

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.

-Your friends at Netflix


Netflix

Perhaps we aren't the only ones twisting this feature into a handy organization tool.

Netflix Drops Profiles ... A Resounding WTF Follows

Netflix sent an email out to users yesterday declaring that soon enough they would be dropping the profile feature from accounts. This is a feature which allows accounts to divide their DVD queue into multiple profiles.

While it might sound trivial, The Girl and I have made it into an essential part of using the service. We're 5 DVD people and we divide the profiles not up for each other, but rather by category. I'm actually rather amazed Netflix doesn't let you do this in a more structured way - it's more insanely handy than I can describe. If we send a popcorn blockbuster movie back, we get one of those next. If we send a TV show back, we get the next disc in the TV show back. It saves us all the needless time of organizing a single list in a chronological order we can't really determine.

Why Netflix, which has had a decent track history of evolving their user interface, would so willing put a baseball bat to our knees is quite beyond me.

I'm hoping they have a really good trick up their sleeves as this puts the service, which is facing stiff enough competition as it is, into a much less desirable mode for us.

Netflix Crashes

The Girl was saying that NPR had a story today that Netflix has taken a dirt nap, and sure enough ... at the time of this writing the website is down. News is pretty bare on what's what, but it looks like movies might get delayed getting sent out.