How Netflix Stole my Eyepatch & I Stopped Stealing Movies

I think it was about a decade ago now when I downloaded my first camcorder movie off the Internet and a love affair was born. Why bother going out and renting something from Blockbuster or forfeiting your first born for a movie ticket and a bucket of popcorn when you could nearly replicate the entire experience, for free, on your couch with Orville Redenbacher at your side?

As time went on and peer-to-peer file sharing grew – and the movies went from shaky, "down in front!" home movies to near-DVD quality replicas – it only got worse. And then, suddenly, it all came to an end. "Cold turkey," as they say. But why?

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Today, after reading an article over on TorrentFreak about how Netflix is killing BitTorrent, I suddenly felt like a reformed smoker who never intentionally put down the cancer stick. It all made sense.

As TorrentFreak’s Ernesto writes, "It doesn’t take a genius to conclude that Netflix’ popularity has a negative effect on the movie piracy rates in the US."

In the States, Netflix nearly doubled the number of new subscribers in the first quarter of 2010, from 1.7 to 3.3 million. In total, Netflix now has 22.8 million paid subscribers in the US, which generated a total revenue of $706 million in the first quarter of this year.

But where did this influx of subscribers come from? Everyone in the know will point to one thing – streaming video. When Netflix first began offering unlimited streaming in 2008, some forecast that it would only erode the companies profits and spell gloom for the company. Quite the opposite. By November 2010, streaming surpassed DVD subscriptions. Rather than cost Netflix the bottom line, streaming – thus far, though we’ll see what happens – has saved the company enormous amounts of money from delivery costs.

When Neftlix finally came around and said it would give me as many movies as I’d like for $8 a month, the love affair with free movies was over. After all, $8 barely gets you in the door at most movie theaters and in some cities it won’t even cover a matinee. For the convenience of never having to plan, eat up my bandwidth and risk getting a letter from the MPAA, $8 is but a pittance. I was one of the 7.7 million new subscribers that jumped on board in 2010 and I haven’t looked back since. It wasn’t a conscience decision, it wasn’t a pang of guilt, it was a simple, cheap way to fulfill my desire to go on Battlestar Gallactica benders and quickly queue up whatever movie everyone else had raved about six months ago that I’d never gone to see. 

Sure, Netflix doesn’t get first-run movies, or those not-yet-in-the-theater screeners, like peer-to-peer networks do, but my eight bucks buys me a peace of mind and enough content to keep me happy until it makes its way around. As Ernesto concludes, "Netflix shows that people are willing to pay for access to movies online, even when plenty of pirated copies are available. The next step is to offer easy access to movies in the rest of the world, and get rid of the artificial delays in release dates."

Besides, if the movie is that good, I might actually hit the theater…and once again be convinced that the only logical approach to movie theater popcorn is the large, because who can justify paying 75 cents less for half as much popcorn? That’s just silly.

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