From FORBES Leadership (first published February 2, 2011) by Frederick E. Allen ☛..Lately people keep telling me how great Netflix is, because you can see anything you want, anytime, streaming on your TV or computer. That’s hardly my experience. I keep finding that when there’s a movie I really want to see, I can’t get it. To find out if my experience can withstand scientific scrutiny, I just did a quick test. I checked how many of Roger Ebert’s best movies of 2010 are available by streaming. Well, eight of his top 10 are out on video and can be ordered by mail from Netflix, but only one of them, I Am Love, can be streamed. The Social Network, Inception,Winter’s Bone, The Secret in Their Eyes, The American, The Ghost Writer, and The Kids Are All Right are all available only via the United States Postal Service. If I want to stream, I’ll have to watch something inferior.
But, you say, there are all those classics you can watch. Yes, but not to stream. I find only one major Marx Brothers movie, Duck Soup, available for streaming. No major Fred Astaire movie except Daddy Long Legs(unless you count Royal Wedding). Why is this?
But, you then say, at least you can get, albeit only by mail, rare gems and high-culture treasures you’ll never find in the few remaining storefront video places. No again. I’ve been wanting to watch a DVD of Richard Wagner’s opera Die Walküre. It’s one of the masterpieces of the operatic repertoire, and, for that matter, of Western culture. If I go toBlockbuster.com, which I guess I’ll have to do, I can order it conducted by James Levine or Pierre Boulez or Hans Knappertsbusch or Daniel Barenboim or Hartmut Haenchen or Lothar Zagrosek. Netflix gives me exactly zero choices. Or, to be more precise, it offers three, none of them streaming of course, but says I can’t order any of them. I can “save” them, as they are all “DVD availability date unknown.”
So I’m not hating those rumors that Amazon may be getting into the video streaming business.
