Watch Now Revisited

Date March 1, 2007

Reihan Salam reviews Netflix’s Watch Now service in Slate. Basically, he sees it as a great concept with some serious technological and content problems to work out. Of course, he also says:

I will note here that my Netflix habits are unconventional. During my early days as a Netflix subscriber, I spent anywhere from 1 to 3 hours a night watching DVDs on fast forward with the subtitles on. Because I read fairly quickly, I was able to follow twists and turns at high speed, thus increasing my cultural literacy in record time. This is impossible with Watch Now. To fast-forward, you grab the slider and drag it to the right, then wait. It’s more like teleporting than running at high speed.

Um, yeah. Most people rent movies to, you know, watch them—not just to get the Cliff’s Notes version. (This also goes a long way to explain why he doesn’t have a problem with the “sub-DVD” image quality—he isn’t watching movies for anything but the dialogue and plot, so who cares how it looks?)

On the other hand, he definitely has a point here:

Conceptually, Watch Now is the perfect vessel for instant movie gratification. Ever rent, say, Street Fighter Alpha and discover that it’s not the modern classic your “friend” promised? With Watch Now, you can watch two minutes and abandon ship. You’ll still have 17 hours minus 58 minutes of watching time to go. So, in between checking sports scores and reading blogs, you’ll be able to catch up on old episodes of that new hit TV show everyone’s raving about.

That is a fair criticism—it is really annoying when a Netflix rental is a dud, especially when it’s a “classic.” Many’s the time I’ve watched 10 minutes of a movie and then let the DVD sit around for months because I didn’t want to watch the rest but didn’t want to feel guilty about returning it unwatched. That’s what economists call “dumb.”

However, I’ve had Watch Now for a month or two now, and aside from taking a moment to try it out I haven’t used it at all. I haven’t even considered it. I’m pretty busy and can’t even keep up with my Netflix DVD stream—I’m averaging 1 or 2 discs a week, which is not that great. But when I have time to watch something, I’m watching the DVDs, for several reasons (at :

  • I have a sweet TV. I spent too much money on it, but now that it’s here I want to use it. And although I could, technically, watch Watch Now movies on it, I wouldn’t consider it. The resolution sucks, and I’d have to use my keyboard/mouse to play, pause, fast forward, rewind, etc. But at the same time, watching things on my monitor isn’t ideal either. Watching short youtube vids is one thing, but sitting in a deskchair staring at a blurry movie on a screen 18 inches in front of you for two hours is another. It might be okay for watching an episode or two of a tv show, though—which leads us to…

  • Watch Now selection is a joke. This was the first thing I noticed when I checked out the service. You can’t go online with a movie in mind, because they barely have any movies online. You have to just browse through what they’ve got and hope you find something that piques your interest. Not ideal. As part of his review, Salam notes “I can honestly say, however, that in the 12 or so hours I’ve spent watching Netflix’s streaming offerings, I’ve seen nothing I would pay to see.” Yikes! This will probably improve in coming months, but until they reach some critical mass of availability it’ll be hard to get me too interested.

  • Watch Now only works on PCs running Windows, via Internet Explorer. This isn’t a huge deal for me but it is annoying. I use Firefox, not Internet Explorer, so I’ve got to go just slightly out of my way to access the service. And it turns out that “just slightly” is the smallest amount too great to get me to go out of my way. Of course, for lots of people (linux/OS X users) it’s not just an annoyance—it’s a complete barrier to use. Much like the selection issue, this will probably sort itself out soon (well, I’d guess that linux users are just plain out of luck as usual). Who knows if it’ll make any real difference, though.

It sounds from the review like Salam would be more or less happy if the service just had better content selection. But I don’t think most people would feel that way. Who wants to watch a low-res (and often 4:3 rather than widescreen) movie with no special features on their computer screen in an age of high definition and director’s commentary? Not I. And as long as the average person’s bandwidth is limited to DSL/cable, Netflix won’t be able to significantly improve image quality.

But that’s not to say that there’s no place for Watch Now. The first thing they got right is the price (it’s free, or rather its cost is part of your monthly fee for the DVD rental service). This means that if you’re stuck in a hotel or an airport or a library or a coffeeshop (or anywhere with internet service) with an hour or two to kill, you can just tune into Watch Now and watch the minutes melt away. What a great bonus feature! Netflix would be wise to market it this way, as an extra perk that comes with membership, rather than disappoint users who expect easy instant access to DVD-quality movies on their laptops.

Category Posted in Economics and Advertising, Movies, Tech