Status-Q

I recently tweeted that I had signed up for a (UK) NetFlix trial, but had found little that I wanted to watch, and had been put off by the necessity of installing Silverlight, so was going to return to my trusty ‘Lovefilm by Post’ subscription. This got a lot of responses from friends.

Some expressed surprise that a geek like me should embrace such a backwards technology. Some proposed AppleTV/iTunes or Blinkbox as better alternatives. Others persuaded me to persevere, and recommended the new House of Cards series and Breaking Bad as worthwhile (so I shall certainly give those a go).

Anyway, I went ahead, installed Silverlight on my Mac Mini media server, and we watched Encounter at Farpoint from NetFlix last night, and it generally streamed OK, though the quality was somewhere around VHS-level, I think; certainly not like DVD and a long way from the BluRays we now often get through the post. I’m guessing this is just a poor match of Microsoft software and Apple hardware, because we have 120Mbps broadband, and other streamed content plays very nicely.

So we could probably find an online service that worked – why do we stick to that primitive idea of physical media dropping through the letter box?

Well, streaming services, or at least online purchases, are clearly the future, but still cater largely to the mass-market, and we obviously land somewhere in the ‘long tail’. By way of a simple illustration, here are a dozen films we’ve watched and really enjoyed over the last couple of months. Some of them are slightly obscure, but others have big names and Academy Awards.

I thought I’d do a quick check and see where I could get them, either as a digital purchase or rental. I threw in House of Cards season 1 as well, though I haven’t yet seen it, but now intend to!

Now, this isn’t quite fair, because I knew all of these were available from the postal service – that’s where we saw them. And I’m sure it’s possible to find a good list of things on the other services which are not available through the post.

But I guess my point is that, had we restricted ourselves to other services, most of these dozen excellent films would never have made it to our screen, especially if we didn’t want to cough up the money to purchase them outright.

I didn’t make any special effort to select these, by the way: they are not nearly as obscure as some films we watch: they just happen to be (roughly) the dozen most recent films of the… golly!… ahem!… 821 movies we have watched from LoveFilm over the years since we started subscribing. (We don’t have cable, and don’t really watch any broadcast TV.) We couldn’t, in fact, have rented the majority of those from iTunes, but if we had been able to, it would have cost us about £2900 (assuming we didn’t want HD).

Of course, the elephant in the room here is that with postal delivery you have to know, in advance, a list of things you want to watch, and not be too worried about when you see them. I’m blessed with a wife who enjoys finding good stuff and queuing it up, so we always have 30-40 items in the list. And we have a reasonable amount of control of what arrives when based on how we prioritise those.

Some other notes to explain why this works well for us…

• We live about 20 yards from the postbox, so after we’ve watched something, I stick the disc in the pre-paid envelope and mail it off before we go to bed.

• We enjoy watching the extra features and commentaries on DVDs – something you often don’t get with other forms of delivery.

• If we can’t watch a DVD immediately, we can click a button and have a DRM-free copy of it in about 30 mins, complete with special features and commentaries. But that probably wouldn’t be legal, so of course we wouldn’t know how to do that.

• We can often choose between BluRay and DVD (depending whether we want a modest gain in resolution in exchange for a big delay in startup time).

• We don’t have to finish watching things within a given timeframe.

• We currently have the subscription which give you up to two disks at home at any one time, so with that, and the disks we own, and the stuff that EyeTV has recorded for us, we are never short of choice.

• On average, we probably watch two or three movies a week, meaning that each one costs us about 89p.

In fact, I think we may start moving to some combination of the pre-planned postal and the on-demand streamed systems, and Blinkbox looks like an attractive service, if the quality’s good – on some of the above, purchasing from Blinkbox costs about the same as renting from iTunes.

But we’ve also seen a lot of very good stuff for 89p that we couldn’t have seen anywhere else. And quite often, it’s in 1080p resolution. On other services, the resolution would be lower and 1080p would be the price…