in the very early days of the blog i asked:
more later. by the way, i am intrigued by netflix’s new “friends†feature–even if it unkindly says “you have no friends†when i click the tab now. anyone interested in linking to each other’s rental queues?
mike and i are netflix friends (which he has somewhat pathetically had inscribed on his business card, and listed in his cv). embarassingly for me, we agree on 90% of our film ratings; embarassingly for him, i can see that he has the entire emanuelle and ernest series in his queues. anyone else on netflix who wants to open themselves up in this way? if so, click on this.
my vibrant interest in Deanna Durbin movies is nobody’s business but my own.
I’m in, but I use the ‘Friends’ feature purely to plunder. Mike has close to 500 movies in his queue, so every time I run low, I check out his list and add a handful to mine (hence ‘Ichi the Killer’). Interestingly, Mike and I only agree 78% of the time, while the two of you agree 90% of the time, something I will have to ponder as I prepare Christmas dinner tomorrow. By the way, I’m glad to see (but not surprised) that I correctly guessed that Alexander was the movie you gave only one star to).
despite our shared love of action movies, chris, we only agree 55% of the time. i assume this is because of all those benny hill dvd’s that you’ve given 5 stars to.
giovanna hasn’t even rated enough movies for an agreement percentage to be posted on my main friends display, but digging deeper it emerges that she and i agree even less on the movies she has rated so far: only 24% of the time. however, there are no movies that i’ve given more than 3 stars to and she fewer and vice versa.
Hum, when I log in, it tells me we agree 75% of the time. I wonder where that other 20% goes when you log in.
clearly, you agree with me 75% of the time whereas i agree with you only 55% of the time. seems about right.
i got netflix only a few months ago. i think my ratings should be considered canonic.
i’d also like to have more netflix friends! if you want to be my netflix friend, please click on this link!
No link here Gio but I’d like to be your netflix friend.
fa…fa…friend?
i’m glad, jeff, that you want to be my friend! the link works for me, but just in case, here’s the whole url:
http://www.netflix.com/BeMyFriend/P5Vn7MqAXSvnjEqCuDNd
The ‘Watch Now’ feature popped up on my Netflix page yesterday. There is not a huge choice yet, but it is great to be able to browse a few minutes of a movie or a TV show and decide if you want to rent it on DVD or invest the time to watch the whole thing on your computer.
The problem is that it means I can now watch a movie in my office at any time, and the connection speed is better in my office than home, so the temptation to watch rather than work will be hard to resist. I watched 20 minutes of ‘Little Britain’ yesterday while waiting for a student to show up.
Not yet in Minneapolis/St. Paul . . . sigh. And where the hell is my copy of Jesus Camp? Obviously somebody underestimated the power of tweeners for Jesus.
tweezers for Jesus?
i just got watch now and i think i can see pretty much what i want, or at least from a brief (like, six second) glance it looked as if i could watch a lot. question: what does netflix have to gain from allowing us to watch 15 (in my case) more movies a month for no extra cost? are they making an experiments and planning on charging people later if it is successful? now i’ll never leave the house, except to teach. my days as a regular human being are over.
reynolds has rated 3,468 movies. i don’t think i’ve seen that many movies in my whole life, counting the repeats. do you suffer from insomnia, mike?
Well, three to four films a week times 52 equals 150 to 200 a year times a conservative estimate of 20 years of film watching equals 4000+ films (the first movie I saw in the theatre was in 1965 so this would be a very conservative estimate, I suspect, for nearly all of us). I never rate movies on Netflix (why bother); can you rate movies that haven’t been sent to your home? If so, Reynolds must still have a few thousand more to categorize by number value.
I just calculated that I’ve recieved 536 films from Netflix since joining in January 2003, which breaks down to a little over 11 films per month. So Reynolds must have a vast array of super cinematic powers.
i give everything gio and jeff like one star without watching it–that triples my rate of rating.
I started rating because I thought the recommendation system might help. But… those programs are still not very sophisticated. Some day, though, I imagine algorithms which will predict what I will and won’t like. Then I can stop watching, and just assume.
Now I keep rating for the social practices–I enjoy the fact that I can see how Gio rates so many of my favorite action flicks one star, and to puzzle over why Chris isn’t more fond of this or that, and so on.
But, yeah–whenever a film pops up on the screen that I’ve seen, I rate it. The numbers reflect hours in theaters and in front of the tube over the last 39 x 365 x 24.
being the serious and thorough person i am, i take my ratings seriously too, and don’t rate anything unless a) i’ve seen it recently and remember it well and b) feel pretty committed to my rating. ah, but rating recklessly, anyone can do that!
yes, jeff, you can spend hours in front of your computer rating each and every film that appears on your screen (and they’ll keep appearing!).
do you also suffer from insomnia?
no one answered my question about “watch now.” WHAT’S DA MATTER WITH YOU?!?
I think the wave of the future will be downloading all digital media onto a computer screen/television screen (no more discs in the mail or trips to the stripmall). So Netflix (like Comcast’s OnDemand feature) is building their brand early (Viacom is always behind the times; what’s up with that). It strikes me as smart and I suspect, down the road, you may be asked to pay a bit more than $19.25 but will have 24 hour access to all films in the Netflix library. It will probably be a few years before that happens, so for now we get free viewing–limited simply by the numbers of titles currently available. It appears I do have access to “watch now” but you have to go into your account and activate it (no one mentioned that before!!). I watched a few minutes of 12 Monkeys last night as well as a scary 1970s BBC production of As You Like It with Helen Mirren (the wigs alone will undo you). I see The Puffy Chair is available so I might give that a look and Bong Joon-ho’s Memories of Murder is also available. I’m loving the fact that my new computer is superfast and that I got the deluxe (Dell calls it “ultra”) 20-inch flat screen monitor. The films look quite grand and I can imagine turning them on and off at will. I watch “Heroes” every week on the NBC.com site as it competes with “24.” So, I guess we may be asked to grow used to watching on the computer or setting our computer up so that it can feed into the television (I’m not there yet).
I’m not sure what Netflix is using as a business model. But my guess is that they want to be sure that their current DVD rental customers don’t go elsewhere to get streaming movies. I certainly would not pay extra, on top of the $18.95 a month I now pay for Netflix streaming movies: the selection is not good enough yet, and my computer is not as fast as Jeff’s. So it makes sense to offer the streaming movies for free to existing subscribers until the transition is complete (we all have super fast computers and every movie and TV show goes straight to streaming) to keep us in the Netflix family.
My favorite feature of the Netflix friends is when you get a little pop quiz: Arnab hated one of these movies and rated the others much higher. Can you guess which one: The Apartment, Shawshank Redemption, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape and Andaz, Apna, Apna. [I picked Shawshank, correctly.]
Okay, so I followed Jeff’s note and discovered that I, too, can do Watch Now, and… yeah, nice. There are many flicks on my excessive queue that would float around, never moving up, and now I can occasionally pluck one up. Watched a not-very-good “Masters of Horror” film by John Carpenter, called “Cigarette Burns.” One of those horror-fiction chestnuts about a film so horrifying it drives its audience to actual violence. And, as usually happens, I was driven to violence by the endless exposition of how horrifying this unseen film is.
Still, great little feature. And it looks like a very large number of the films in my queue are available.