Golublog: An Anthropology Blog

With broadband adoption surging across the country, my wife and I are switching our netflix subscription to unlimited streaming + four CDs at home at a time. It’s the opposite of adoption patterns but makes good sense.

Think about it: after two years with a Roku box we are simply running out of things to watch on Netflix streaming — and particularly quality TV shows, which are our standard fare these days. No other flat-rate service can provide them, especially not the pathetic Hulu Plus, which not only makes you pay money to watch commercials, but basically takes a whole tranche of content and makes sure it’s not available to anyone with a dedicated content streaming device. I mean really.

Basically there is a doughnut hole in content offerings these days: a great, viable streaming option offered by Netflix with limited selection but great pricing; and ridiculously over-priced on-demand offerings from Apple, Amazon, and whatnot, which offer even greater selection and convenience, but which are just ridiculous overpriced when compared to every other way of watching television.

It might just be us — we were relatively early adopters of Netflix, have pretty strange tastes (read: only watch the documentaries our friends were in) and have been watching for a while. The cabinet is starting to look a little bare. But look: we watch basically two hours of TV a night after the kids go to sleep, which is like US$120 a night if you were to buy it off of your Roku at the cheapest prices going in the on-demand market. At that price, why not just pay for cable?

In the long run, it’s not clear to me that cheap flat rate services will win over premium-priced on-delivery — especially once Big Content gets its confidence back up in the new digital marketplace. At the moment, it looks like the right choice for us is yesterday’s media.