Thursday, August 31, 2006

When Netflix goes online

I finally signed up for Netflix, and I'm totally excited! I mean watching lots of movies and shows will be really fun, but also their website is really good. You can see pop-up movie descriptions anywhere they list a movie name, the friends feature works good, they have online previews, just overall everything is intuitive and fun to use.

A few years before it was available, I got excited about being able to burn my own DVDs of shows I like. First they came out with some of the high dollar DVD recorders, but I wanted more control than that. When my brother Leland got his Media Center PC, I was amazed because there was the technology I wanted, and I didn't realize it was available yet. I could finally record shows from TV digitally, and keep the ones I wanted on DVD.

So now I am similarly excited about a future development of Netflix (or whatever company does it). I can't wait till Netflix has a 100% online option. There are already companies offering cable TV on the internet, and obviously it's really only a matter of bandwidth. Imagine what it will be like to pay $20 a month or whatever, and have the entire Netflix library online, ready to be streamed in DVD quality right to your TV on demand! Pretty sweet. Eventually, you'll have every movie and every TV show ever made right at your fingertips. It will become as easy to watch something as it is to look up information on the internet today. For example, today if you are trying to remember the words to the Brady Bunch theme, you can hop online and find them lickity split. Demo: here they are, it took me about 1 minute, but that included looking at a couple of sources to make sure I had a pretty accurate version. So in the (hopefully near) future, if you are discussing with friends the episode where Bobby and Cindy get lost at the Grand Canyon, and someone never saw it, you could just get on Netflix and watch it and laugh. It's pretty fun to think about to me, technology is cool.

1 comment:

Noel Green said...

I totally agree!
And can't wait as well!

It makes me think of the way that I have over 2000 songs on my computer, and I can just "go to" to a song anytime I want.

That idea (and MP3s and Quicktime) were both invented by a guy that watched Star Trek one day and saw an episode where Data was listening to a lot of music at once and could jump from song to song. So, he invented that.

A lot of computer / technology has come from Star Trek actually. A database of all media every developed is certainly one of the things that "they" told us would be possible in the late 60's.

Cool huh?! :)