NetFlix Streaming Does Not Cut It!!

Jan 26, 08:43 PM

I was a NetFlix customer a few years ago, back when they had a different streaming plan. It did not provide enough hours for me to watch anything, so I put the account on hold. A few weeks ago, my DVD player bit the dust, so I went all out and bought a Blu-Ray player. I got the Sony BDP-570 and it has all kinds of streaming services built into it. Most of the services are high def. Hulu+ has been great!!! But this little rant is not about Hulu, so I’ll just not mention them anymore, other than to say they are fantastic….

NetFlix, at first, seemed pretty cool. Loaded up our queue with some movies and watched away…. the first week or 10 days we had the Sony. Lately, while trying to watch “Teas of the Sun”, our experience has been terrible. Last Saturday was the first attempt at watching this title and we gave up after the first 20 minutes of the movie. In that 20 minute time frame, we probably experienced at least 5 buffering episodes, probably 10!

Tonight, we are about 75 minutes into the movie, in movie time. In actual time, we are now up to a good 150 minutes. At times, the movie has buffered every two or three minutes. At best, we managed to get about 15 minutes of viewing time before the stream buffered again.

Calling support was useless. The rep insisted that everything under the sun was at fault, as long as it did not include anything related to NetFlix. The rep was doing his best to absolve NetFlix from any responsibility. Right now, I am on a free trial of NetFlix. I am pretty sure that I will not become a paying customer again. They got about two weeks to astound the hell out of me to make up for the crappy experience I had with “Tears of the Sun”.

And…. I did not even mention the lack of a decent selection of movies as a streaming customer.

Nor did I mention the one little glitch I had with Hulu – on Saturday, I got all settled in to watch some “No Ordinary Family” on Hulu and I got an error message about the service being unavailable. Being a new customer, I did not know what this meant or if it was common. I e-mailed tech support (something NetFlix could really take a hint with), and before I sent the e-mail, the service was up and running again. It may have been down for a while, but I only noted the problem for less than a minute. Before my show started however, I had already received a reply from Hulu’s tech support – they credited my account with a weeks free service because of the inconvenience I had.

Sure, Hulu is mainly TV and NetFlix is mainly movies, but I know who I’ll give my money and loyalty to….

Les

General Ramblings, informational

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