criterionforum.org

It had to happen the week the last season of "The Wire" comes out...


UGH

Might want to take a look at your Queue, last night it had my top 2 moved into "processing". And this morning they were not there or even back in my Queue, so I had to re-add 3 Women and Mouchette to the top of my list. They said 3 Women was instant view, but I will not watch something I really want to see on my computer.

AisleSeat wrote:

Perkins Cobb wrote:When Netflix's inventory on OOP DVDs drops below a certain level, they'll take it out of circulation and mark it as "save" instead of "add" on their website.

Interesting. As I know little of Netflix's internal affairs, may I ask where and how you learned of such a OOP policy? I'm not saying what you state is not accurate, but I am curious.

What is this "certain level" below which an OOP title is taken out of circulation? Even with only 15 or 25 copies of a particular film on hand, hundreds of subscribers each year would have access to it. I could imagine some OOP titles becoming valuable and a few unscrupulous subscribers purloining the DVD, claiming they never received it. But I wonder how often this actually occurs?

It seems to be in Netflix's best interest to keep a title listed as "available" for as long as possible. Sadly, once a title has gone out of print, it could be years before there's a reissue. The longer Netflix keeps an OOP title available to subscribers, the more they gain in terms of competitive advantage.

My comment was based on not on any inside info but on observation & trial and error in renting OOP and reissued DVDs. With 8.4 million subscribers, I can't imagine that they allowed all of them to jockey for the last surviving copy of The Last Days of Disco in the Albuquerque shipping center until somebody finally swiped it.

However, as I mentioned, I stopped trying to outwit the multiple editions thing a year or two ago. They've gotten better about other things, so maybe they finally did realize that enough people care about getting a crappy old Lionsgate DVD instead of a new Criterion to start springing for enough copies of the latter and chuck out all the remaining copies of the old one.

I love this (from the Yahoo article):

In this Oct. 22, 2007 file photo, a Netflix customer prepares to watch the movie 'True Lies,' at her home in Palo Alto, Calif.


This all sucks obviously, but I have to say, if you are able to get Instant Viewing to work, it really adds a huge value to your membership. I watch nearly as much stuff instantly as I do through the mail. And I actually watch a lot of my DVDs on my computer anyway, since the TV with the DVD player is often tied up. You can fullscreen the image so you can't tell it's a computer screen, and 2' away from a 17" monitor is probably a better viewing field than 8' away from a 27" TV screen. (That's what I'm dealing with anyway.)

Problem solved?

Netflix wrote:Our Shipping Centers Are Mailing DVDs
Delayed DVD Shipments Are Being Sent Today (Friday)
Click here to learn more
We’re happy to report that all of our shipping centers are resuming normal operations (after 3 days of issues). If you should have been shipped a disc Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday, it will ship today (Friday).

We apologize for any inconvenience this has caused. To all of you whose shipments have been delayed, we’ll be automatically applying a 15% credit to your next billing statement. Or, if you are new to Netflix and your first shipments have been delayed, we recognize that this is not a good way to begin your Netflix membership and we’ll automatically extend your free trial by a week.

Again, we apologize for the delay and thank you for your understanding.

The Netflix Team

Hmm.... then howcome my Queue says they wont be shipping until Monday? I may try Blockbuster Online rental if Netflix continues to ship at this slow pace.

psufootball07 wrote:I may try Blockbuster Online rental if Netflix continues to ship at this slow pace.

It won't continue at this slow pace, and then you'll be really disappointed you even wasted a month trying Blockbuster Online. Netflix is a thousand times better, even if they did have to take the whole two weeks off from shipping.

=D> on that file photo. Way to Netflix a movie that's on basic cable every half hour. I wonder if Die Hard, Cast Away, and The Shawshank Redemption are also in that person's queue.

I think they give you one of those movies for free if you buy ten gallons of gas from Texaco

I own a Roku box and all I can say is that it's amazing. The only drawback is that the slection is paltry. Still, there are some Fassbinder's available, "The Devil Doll"- which I happend to watch over and over, and many others. It's also fun to slueth around the site for some gems.

I'd say if you can spring for the box, which I think retails for $100 bucks, you'll be in cable heaven.

Maybe NetFlix meant next Friday huh

I went to get the mail this morning and I had received three Netflix envelopes - the same three I found e-mails for when I logged into my mailbox just now saying they would arrive tomorrow.

I didn't get any emails but the titles that were supposed to ship out several days ago but then disappeared completely did finally appear in my queue as out for delivery-- I'm shocked but obviously pleased

Well, these are the first emails I've gotten from Netflix all week, but it looks like my DVDs are supposed to come in the mail today. (I think I'm at the end of a route, don't usually get my mail until as late as 6pm, so I'll have to wait and see.) They All Laughed is supposed to come today. This had better be worth the wait, Domino.

For those of you with the Roku player, is the image quality on your TV screens equivalent to DVD? (On, say, a 36" screen or larger?)

I've been posting here and there about movie availability on Netflix's Instant Viewing feature, but I've been thinking it would be a good resource to have this information all in one place, for those who might find it useful.

EDIT: I used to do this manually, but nsps found a site that's much more comprehensive:

Newly Available for Instant Viewing

Availability for Instant Viewing Expiring Soon

I guess this thread can still be useful though if anyone wants to highlight something of particular note that's included in one of the above links, if any errors are found there, or just for general discussion of Netflix's Instant Viewing program.

How do you/we establish this information? Do they have notification e-mails or something? As someone who is an XBox Live account holder and Netflix account holder, this information will prove valuable.

It's just something I look out for. My regular queue is just about completely full (to the limit of 500). When something becomes available for instant viewing, a 'play' button shows up in the queue next to that title. I also have about 90 films in my instant queue. Usually, about a month before a film will no longer be available for instant viewing, the last date available will show up in my instant queue.

Of course, I can only provide information for movies that I am keeping tabs on. That's where the community aspect of this forum comes in. However, I don't intend for this to be a comprehensive listing of all films available for instant viewing. (You can easily find out on Netflix's website if a particular film is available or not.) This thread is just meant to mention the new ins and outs.

By the way, contrary to what they are shipping as a rental, which I've seen reported as colorized & dubbed, Pasolini's The Gospel According to St. Matthew IS the Italian language version in B/W for instant viewing.

Here's a list of films in my queue that are available for instant viewing. Hope this helps SWO17:

Heavy Metal
The Candidate
The Orphanage
La Vie en Rose
Paris, Je T'aime
How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair
The Ten
Confessions of a Superhero
2 Days in Paris
Cruising
The Chase
Tootsie
The Yakuza
The Russians Are Coming ...
Cabaret
Cool Hand Luke
High Plains Drifter
The Hot Rock
Last Tango in Paris
The Way We Were
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers
Witchfinder General
Doctor Zhivago
Rancho Deluxe
Little Murders
Bedazzled
Fast, Cheap & Out of Control
The People vs. Larry Flynt
Murder by Death
The Devil's Own
Last Life in the Universe
Gerry
The Jerk
The Beat That My Heart Skipped
Demonlover
Dial M for Murder
The Sum of All Fears
L.I.E.
Time of the Wolf
The Cheap Detective
...And Justice for All
Palindromes
Swing Shift
Who Am I This Time?
The Red Balloon / White Mane
American Cannibal
Two-Minute Warning
The Knack...and How to Get It
The Driver
The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser
Ordinary People
King Corn
Death Wish
Exiled
Czech Dream
30 Rock: Season 1

The Netflix rentals Slate readers just can't bring themselves to watch.

Antoine Doinel wrote:The Netflix rentals Slate readers just can't bring themselves to watch.

Reading a number of the comments from the reader discussion forum reminds me that I almost can't stand to think about the way most people "watch" movies or what they consider a challenging or harrowing viewing experience (Life is Beautiful?!). I'm still trying to get used to the idea that people stretch the picture to fit their widescreen TV, watch movies on cell phones, and all that.
A couple of people here were suggesting two ways of getting through "tough" films: one is keeping the computer monitor next to the television so you can surf the net until "something actually happens" in the movie. The person says, "The key to happiness is low expectations." A different person suggested the same thing:

I popped it in, had it playing for about 40 minutes while I surfed the Web, and realized that I had no idea what was going on and was wasting my time, so I took it out and mailed it back. Is that so hard?

Another idea was to play the commentary track to avoid all those unbearable silences in a film like Antonioni's The Passenger.

Many of these people make it pretty clear that the only reason they even put anything in the queue that has more substance than Wonder Bread is out of some sense of liberal or intellectual guilt. I've said it before and I'll say it again: Netflix makes a lot of money on people sitting on these movies for weeks or months at a time.

Gregory wrote:I'm still trying to get used to the idea that people stretch the picture to fit their widescreen TV

What really bugs me is that a fair number of HD cable networks insist on broadcasting 4:3 content stretched wide.

It makes want to scream at the network suits. Every HDTV that I've looked at lets the viewer stretch 4:3 wide to 16:9, if they want to. *None* of them have a setting to un-stretch 16:9 back to 4:3. I can't understand why they would force something like that.

I've actually seen HD networks showing forced stretched versions of pan & scan versions of a wide screen movies ....... which just makes my head hurt.

I haven't gone HD yet, so I'm hardly an expert, but my brother-in-law recently took the dive, and he was watching his TV for a few months with all the images stretched, with no complaints. I was at his house one day with the whole family and pointed this out, but no one said they noticed a problem. It took about an hour (possibly an exaggeration) of navigating through all the menus to finally find the option to view your TV normally. Afterward, they all said "oh yeah, that does look better." But then I still go to my parents-in-law's house and, mindbogglingly, they have the images stretched out of whack on a standard 1.33:1 TV! It's amazing to me how little people care about such a fundamental thing as having people on TV be of the right proportions, especially when they spend most of their free time in front of it.

Gregory wrote:I've said it before and I'll say it again: Netflix makes a lot of money on people sitting on these movies for weeks or months at a time.

As long as this subsidizes my average cost of about 75 cents a film from watching my movies and sending them right back the next day, I have no complaints.

swo17 wrote:It took about an hour (possibly an exaggeration) of navigating through all the menus to finally find the option to view your TV normally.

That seems to vary wildly from TV model to TV model (or maybe I should say "from manufacturer to manufacturer").

I have seen some where that setting was buried pretty deep in the menus.

On the other hand, my TV has a prominent button on the remote dedidcated to cycling through the various zoom / stretch modes. Obviously, that makes changing that setting much easier.

And I use that button pretty regularly, although I only ever use two of the modes ("Normal" and "Zoom"). I use the unstretched Zoom mode when watching widescreen movies that are letterboxed into the 4:3 SD area. That's pretty common on TCM, and comes up occasionally on other networks.