After reading a few reviews (and partly because I was in the mood for some change {lame, I know}), I decided to ditch BlockBuster Online and switch to Netflix for my movie fix. I’ve been with BBO almost since they started (Sep ’04?) so this was a pretty drastic move! In a few hours of playing around, I’ve found a few things I like about NFLX:
- Multiple profiles: Now, the wife & I can both have our own queue without one of us hogging the movie queue.
- Stream to PC: This is the one thing I’m most exited about – not because I want to go from watching movies from my couch on a 40″ screen to sitting at a computer chair watching movies on a 19″ screen, but because I’m fairly certain that this is just a pre-cursor for Netflix providing movie downloads on the XBox.
I’m not too impressed by Netflix’s UI yet – a couple of things that annoy me – for one, why doesn’t the search box just take to me the movie I’m searching for when it offers me suggestions:
It offered me the right movie in the dropdown, but when I select it, it does a search on the term rather than take me to the movie directly. All that AJAXy autocomplete goodness wasted!
The other annoyance: Why is this popup displayed for every movie I add to my queue?
BBO used to let me bulk-add movies to my queue without any annoying popups! I’ll probably also miss the occasional game rental and in-store exchange from Blockbuster, but I’m hoping the larger selection and stream to PC features make up for it!