For the love of Netflix

In August, my husband I decided to sign up for Netflix. So far, my only regret is that we didn't sign up sooner - I LOVE Netflix.

My husband and I watch a lot of movies. For several years in college I worked at a movie theater (from May-Sept 2005, and then June 2006-July 2008), and for the last half of my career there, I was management. Working at the theater, I got to screen films for free before the rest of the public, and I got to bring a guest (or 2 as management) to any non-sold out show.

When I moved back to my hometown and took a job closer to where we were living, we cut but a bit on how many movies were seeing, but not by much, as the theater chain up here has what they call "The Five Buck Club," where after a movie has been in theaters for usually at least 2 weeks, if you are a member, you present your Five Buck Club card and get to see the film for only $5 instead of the full $9.75 or whatever it costs nowadays. Now the only problem with The Five Buck Club, is that sometimes a movie doesn't stay in theaters for more than 2 weeks, or they get rid of it early for a slew of new films they need to make room for or it just does so poorly that they don't see the benefit of keeping it longer than 2 weeks. Because we no longer have a 2nd Run Theater up here anymore, this means hubby and I miss some films.

The week before we joined Netflix, we rented 2 movies from Blockbuster. Just to rent 2 movies from there, that had been out for several months already, cost us $9 total!

With Netflix, for $8.99 a month you can rent unlimited movies (that is, you can have 1 out at a time - if you want more than that at a time you can pay more), and you can watch tons of films instantly online. And the great thing is that you can find TONS of movies - even rare obscure titles, foreign flicks, and old, old classics. You can also rate movies on a 5-star scale and write reviews to share with other Netflix members. If you invite friends to join you and they accept, you can view each other's rated films and queues.

Normally, we didn't use to rent a lot of movies since we usually saw all the ones we really wanted as soon as they came out in theaters, but with Netflix, we no longer need to rush out to see something that might flop in it's opening week and pay almost $20 for it.

With Netflix, we have our queue set up, and if there's something we'd like to see, but don't want to spend the money on it in the theater or if it never made it The Five Buck Club, we can just save it to our queue and when it comes out on DVD it'll be added to the top of our queue and sent to us as soon as a copy is avaliable.

Because of Netflix we have watched so many more movies in the past few months - lately, for our date night, we find ourselves either going out for a nice dinner and coming home to watch our Netflix movie, or we pick up a $5 pizza from Little Caesar's and eat it while we watch our movie.

Talk about a great way to save on your monthly entertainment budget!

And like I said earlier, some films you can even watch instantly on your computer! There's been several times where my husband is at work and I'll find a movie on there that I wanted to see that he didn't, I can go ahead and watch it. Netflix also has tons of TV shows you can either watch instantly or have sent to you disc by disc.

Plus, the more you rate movies, the more movies Netflix can recommend for you based off what you liked and didn't like.

Now true, it might not be as quick as going to the video store yourself and picking something up, however it is pretty quick.

Say we watch our movie on Monday and drop it off in our outgoing mailbox either later that night or early on Tuesday. Tuesday morning, the mail goes out with the DVD we are returning, they receive it late that night or early Wednesday and immediately send us out the next film in our queue, which arrives Thursday afternoon. See? It takes roughly 48hrs to have a new movie sent to you. You can easily watch at least 2 movies a week, in addition to any you may watch online. That is so worth the $8.99 a month! Just one trip to the video store alone costs you roughly $4!

I honestly think Netflix is one of the best inventions of the past few years.