What, I rejoin last night and there's already an article about it? ;)<p>Seriously though, in my search for cheap/free movies what pushed me off the fence about rejoining Netflix was that they were offering the first month free, even though I'm not a new customer. All the details of my account were saved, and all I had to do what update the security code and expiration date on my card. Pretty damn good UX through the re-signup process.<p>The annoyance factor came when I tried to watch a movie. I got an error message with an obscure DRM error code, and instructions to call a Netflix 800 number. Rather than wake Reed Hastings up at an ungodly hour, I Googled around and followed advice to delete a particular Silverlight related file, and restart the browser.<p>Again, no dice, but at least now the error code was one that prompted me to upgrade my version of Silverlight. Downloaded, installed, restart browser. Log back in for the third or fourth time. NOW I can watch my movie.<p>Let's just say that was only mildly annoyed by all of this because the first month was free. And the process in the end was somewhat less painful than hunting for a working stream (...or what that must be like, I'm sure). ;)<p>One free month is more than enough time to re-evaluate whether their streaming catalog is worth the 7.99 monthly price. I do hope they've added more A-list movies on the streaming side, because it's just not worth it for me to tack on another eight bucks to get access to the DVD catalog.
I know I'm like the only person in the world who cares about this but I quit Netflix the moment I saw they used pop-unders for advertising.<p>People used to be screaming at all the popups and popunders in the early 2000s. People stopped screaming because adblockers and customer complaints in general end up getting rid of them.......except for Netflix! WTF!<p>They still use them. Saw a few this week, and I still won't support Netflix because of it.<p>Personally, I think as a geek, you shouldn't support them either.
I don't think it's too surprising. What were their viable alternatives --besides cutting off from video entertainment altogether?<p>I don't think they have credible competitors§ yet. There's Hulu and there's Amazon Prime videos, but neither, to me, have the same breadth.<p>§I mean, via internet delivery. Even DVD mail delivery, they are very good, but that's not a growth market.