I've been a loyal Netflix customer for more than 3 months. I originally joined the service to watch 6 seasons of Scrubs (3 DVDs per season), which I did in less than a month. In the 2 months since then, Netflix has provided me with 2 full seasons of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, 1 season of Taxi, 2 comedy routines, and 10+ other movies. (I know, I know -- I need a life.)
Anyway, for the first time today, I was left at home without a precious red envelope, so I decided to try out the "Instant DVD" feature of Netflix. Instant my a**. Here is a replay of all the steps it took to go from clicking "Play" to clicking "Play" again to actually watch the movie:
Start time: 7:28pm
- Only supports Windows; switch from Mac to Windows
- Only supports IE6+; switch from Firefox to IE
- Install NetFlix player
- Install DRM for Windows Media Player (WMP)
- Security update for WMP
- Upgrade to WMP11
- Upgrade requires validating that Windows is "genuine"
- Reboot! (new version of WMP requires restart)
- Upgrade random component of WMP to support "Movie Playback"
- "You do not have the rights to play this video." click, click click through dialog boxes
- Testing connection speed ... and *play*
End time: 8:02pm.
Finally, 11 steps and 34 minutes later (actually a bit longer than 34 minutes, since I didn't actually count steps 1 and 2), I was ready to watch my 90 minute "Instant DVD". True, this is a one-time process and my next instant movie will be more instant. But still, I'm pretty sure they lose a good chunk of users somewhere before step 7. I can't really blame Netflix, though -- if anything, this just proves the brokenness of DRM.
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