Who needs Blockbuster when Netflix is available?

Well, we finally got around to joining Netflix yesterday, and we’ve already got 60 movies in our queue! Initially we signed up for the 3-at-a-time plan, but we’ll probably change to the cheapest plan once the novelty wears off.

Several of our friends already use Netflix, and they all had good things to say about the service. The only words of caution I received had to do with “throttling” of the movie pipe. This is spelled out in the terms of service, and basically says that if you burn through your queue they reserve the right to take their time sending your next movie. Fair enough, I guess.

Of course, this gives me another feature to hack/play with here on the blog: displaying our Netflix queue and/or recent activity. I was initially thinking of using Jimbo’s mynetflix 1.5 plugin, but he’s been pretty busy lately. It looks like development work has been taken over by Herichon, who recently released mynetflix2. I’ll be fiddling with this plugin and squeezing it into my page somewhere. Of course, this is going to be another customization that needs to be maintained for each theme, sigh.

If you’re a Netflix user reading this blog, feel free to add us (my wife and I) to your friends list. Our Netflix address is
netflix@this_blogs_name.net
(In case that’s not clear enough, you’ll need to replace this_blogs_name with SonicChicken.) My wife and I also have personal profiles to cover movies that we disagree about, for example I like Dr. Strangelove and she doesn’t. If you want to add us individually use our name instead of “netflix” in the account, e.g. jim@this_blogs_name.net.