Netflix: Me Likey

Our family has used Netflix for five years now, with one brief interruption. At our most avid, we maintained a queue of four DVD's, two for me and two for mon amor. For over a year, however, we've been on the one DVD at a time plan, a plan that, since we don't have a t.v. or DVD player and therefore watch everything on our laptop, makes a lot of sense.

What makes even more sense is the option to watch Netflix content online, which we do as often as we can find something that doesn't suck. Just the other night we watched Doubt. The week before that The Princess Bride. Somewhere in the middle I spent a rib-tickling 90 minutes with SNL: The Best of Jimmy Fallon.

But the vast majority of online viewing content on Netflix is not worth the time it takes to watch. Perhaps that's about to change. From CNN:

In a groundbreaking deal for online movie rentals, Netflix and Warner Bros. Home Entertainment announced Wednesday that they have expanded their licensing arrangement for streaming movies, and Netflix now has licensing rights to more of the studio's catalog content.

I've long maintained that I would gladly pay subscription fees for online television content. Netflix is a model that works but that has been hampered by little quality in the content until now. If Warner Bros. can demonstrate that opening its catalog to Netflix subscribers makes money, then who knows what studios might come running to the table?

Of course, the catch is that Netflix has agreed to not offer Warner Bros. new releases on DVD (or Blu-ray) until 28 days after they go on sale. But I rent fewer-and-fewer DVD's and I consume more and more content "in the cloud" online, so I could care less about that.

Kudos, I say, to Netflix.