My brother gave me a gift trial subscription in early 2004 or 2005 and I have been hooked ever since.

It is way more fun than going to the video store. The website actually knows you and what you watched, in a way no corner video store person ever can.

Not just the videos you rented from Netflix, but your ratings of all the movies you have seen at the theater, on TV, and from the corner DVD (and former videotape) stores.

Of course, you don’t have to disclose any of that but it would be silly not to – the site uses this food for thought to help pick good suggestions for other DVDs you will probably enjoy consuming.

Last week, I gave my mom a gift subscription for Netflix. She has not been feeling well lately, and I am hoping watching some hilarious comedy movies will help her feel a little bit better.

I just noticed on the site that Netflix has an option that people with Blueray and DVD-HD players can enable so they can rent discs that take advantage of their player’s special high-def features.

Netflix is an all around great company and I am happy to be a customer of theirs.

Pretty good selection and reasonably fast service, though I hate having to wait for multi-disc selections. (If theft is the concern, I think I’d prefer a “Bill me for a ‘insurance’ amount on my credit card” option to discourage would-be thieves and allow the rest of us to get, say, all 4 discs of Simpsons Season 8 at a time. On the one occasion when we shipped back a disc and they claimed to not get it for several days, they took our word for it, marked it “lost in mail” and got us our next selection. (The post office was just slow…it turned up at NetFlix about 3 days after we noted it as lost.)

A lot better than paying the fines if we forget to take something back to the video store…

We just started using nextflix. I’ve heard stories on all ends of the spectrum, so we’ll see how it goes