A year of Netflix. 

I've had Netflix for just about a year now, and it's simply a fantastic service. For the most part, I get 1 day turnaround on movies (or 2 day ... I don't know exactly how you'd describe it). For instance, I'm on vacation, so I'm trying to get through a bunch of movies. I watched one on Monday, get it in the mail that day, and I'll have a new movie on Wednesday.

Over the course of a just about a year, I've never had a single problem. Occasionally I've had a delay in getting a movie, but that's rare.

Today, I had my first problem. I received Swimming Pool and I sat down to watch it. My DVD player starts making that tell-tale noise where it's having trouble reading the disc. Sure enough, no matter what option I pick, my DVD player chokes and I can't watch the movie.

Booo.

However, Netflix handles the whole situation pretty well. I just go to my account, tell them there's a problem and that I want a replacement DVD sent to me ASAP. Hopefully, that means I'll get it on Monday. We'll see.

In the meantime, I'm down to just having Kurosawa's Ran at home. While I do really want to watch it, I have to be in the right frame of mind to watch a 2.5 hour Japanese movie. So, I'm probably going to watch a few episodes of Angel Season 4 instead.

Netflix is a perfect example of a modern, Web 2.0 type company. They give me the ability to decide what I want to watch and (for the most part) when I want to watch it. No forcing down my throat the new releases. If I want to watch a random crappy horror movie, I can do it by just throwing it in my queue and waiting for it to show up. When they screw up, they make it very easy to get restitution. Pretty great.

I've just requested that they send me my rental history. I'm curious to see how many movies I've been able to see over the past year or so using Netflix. If I had to guess, it's probably in the range of 100 movies or so.