The Mother of Invention.

I've been logging a lot of internet time since I have a lot of it on my hands, and I don't have to share "WiFi time". Tonight I finally decided to check out a relatively new service from Netflix, called "Watch Instantly". I/We've been subscibers of Netflix for a number of years, and enjoy the huge catalog of movies they have to offer.. mainstream flicks, indies, documentaries, TV shows, foreign, classics... the list goes on. Our problem is our travel schedule. The movies have to catch up with us, and we don't always watch them right away. In fact, right now we've got a movie on our shelf we've been carrying around for over a month. That's not economical at $16.95 a month.

With the "Watch Instantly" option, I can download up to 16 hours of movies during any billing period, so tonight for my "road test" I downloaded some Japanese Anime... a little ditty called "Girl's School"... (and now I know why geeks and adolescent boys are so enamored of this genre ;^)

Next, wanting to watch something short, I chose Season 1 of 30 Rock, (primarily because I was forced to miss it when it was on air because - someone - always wanted to watch CSI instead). My personal opinion is that 30 Rock is one of the funniest, and best written programs on television due, in no small part, to it's creator, Tina Fey. Not only is she wickedly, brilliantly funny, but she's so damn hot! (It's OK... Margaret knows about this crush and is cool with it.. right?) Besides, I'm not alone!


Anyway, my experiment with Netflix downloads.. (which are included in our monthly service, by the way) was a mixed positive. Because I'm parked a fair ways from the antenna at this campground, the signal was low, causing some buffering issues, but Netflix has a nice fix, which halts the stream until a sufficient amount of buffering has occurred to not hold up the movie again. Their viewer (which you download for your first movie) adjusts to the speed of your connection. Overall, I like it, and will probably use it whenever we're in a place that has faster than dial-up speeds.