I can play a kind of guessing game around what precipitated a particular whim. Or I can allow for serendipity - movies appear in my mailbox that I barely remember adding in the first place. If I want to go deep into Albert Finney, I can line up nearly every film of his, from “Tom Jones” to “The Gathering Storm.” I can toggle movies upward if I grow impatient to see something I added three years earlier. Last week, for example, I watched two movies not currently available on Netflix: 1979’s “The China Syndrome” and 1980’s “Altered States,” both period paranoia fare and reflective of the sort of niche moods and obsessions that populate my maxed-out 500-disc-long queue. But DVD.com offered all its movies and TV shows at all times. Netflix pays for streaming rights to films and programs it does not own the rights to, which means that films come and go on the service according to the terms of those contracts. Choice in all senses of the word - about simultaneously expanding and narrowing my options, about active decisions over passive ones, about human curation as opposed to the algorithm. It’s a choice and it’s about better choices. “You’ll be converted,” he said with the assurance of someone who understands accepted behavioral norms.īut I had been happy bucking the norm! My devotion to DVD.com is not about Luddite resistance or stubborn nostalgia. A colleague once went so far as to set up an HBO Max trial account for me and shove it into my inbox. Netflix, to those of us who lived and breathed during the previous century. I was the kind of full-throttle loyalist who actively urged others to switch back to the vestigial anomaly that was DVD.com - the O.G. In the face of pity from viewers of all ages, I’ve boasted for years, perhaps with a touch of hyperbole, of being the last paying subscriber of DVD.com, the spinoff division Netflix created in 2011. Whereas most functioning members of 21st-century culture greeted the news with indifference or puzzlement - “People still use DVDs?” - the announcement hit me with a jolt of dread and dismay. 29 it will cease its 25-year-old DVD-by-mail delivery business to focus on its streaming service. Netflix, which has been struggling recently, announced last week that on Sept.
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