Netflix Free Trial: Day 30

Damn it, Netflix, you got me. Even as I write this, I’m streaming The Cabin in the Woods. It’s a movie I’ve been meaning to get around to watching, much like a lot of what Netflix is offering.

When you first sign up for Netflix, you get to indicate how often you watch certain genres. I just clicked on the option of “Sometimes” for everything because I have a terrible time making decisions and really, sometimes, I do watch X, Y, Z – my strange tastes are all over the place. And sadly, I never did try to hook up any of our gaming consoles to the television to see how Netflix fared there.

Once I got through the red-tape of tailoring my viewing experience, I was immediately overwhelmed by choices. Then I started laughing at the hyper-specific breakdown of categories. Apparently, some of the genres that would appeal to me were, “Critically-acclaimed Violent Foreign Thrillers” and “Cerebral Suspenseful TV Dramas.” But I’ll be damned if I didn’t go through those categories and see things I’d already seen or that I wanted to see. Point: Netflix.

I was able to watch House of Cards and Hemlock Grove, both Netflix originals that are not available anywhere else. I hated House of Cards until the very end of the first episode when I found myself needing to know what happened next – and before I knew it, I was attached to the characters and through the season. Hemlock Grove took even less time to draw me in. I finished that series in four days. Netflix makes it entirely too easy to binge watch television shows by releasing full seasons at a time.

On top of the fantastic original programming Netflix offers, there are a lot of older series available to watch. The one drawback I found when looking up old series was the lack of being up to date on the seasons. Sons of Anarchy and Breaking Bad were two of the series I looked up that had some of the previous seasons available, but not all of them. And if Netflix isn’t offering the episodes, I’m not sure there’s another legitimate method to stream them.

Netflix also does not offer the latest episodes after airing on television like Hulu offers, so if you’re looking to Netflix to keep up on current television, you’re going to be disappointed. In an average week, I watch about six hours of current television shows that I watched on an actual television set. During the whole month of June, I watched about thirty hours of television on Netflix – including both series already mentioned, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Cabin in the Woods – which averages out to an hour a day.

It was also much easier to jump from my laptop to my iPad to my cellphone to continue a series. The quality was good on both and Netflix kept track of where I started on my laptop and continued on my phone. I wouldn’t want to watch all my Netflix on my phone, but during my lunch breaks at work, it got the job done.

When you break down an hour a day, for $8 a month, you’re paying a little over a quarter a day. If you watch two movies a week, it’s the same as hitting up a RedBox minus the gas costs to get and return your movie. I wanted to be skeptical and I didn’t want to start paying for a Netflix subscription, but I’m not going to lie, the bastards have my $8 for at least one month while I continue to try to catch up on older series and a lot of the movies released in the last few years that I never got around to seeing.