Entertainment & Netflix

My hairdresser is famous.

Ok, well, maybe famous is pushing it. He has done work in Hollywood for many years, including on my favorite TV series as the principle hair stylist. I only tell you this to set the stage (haha get it). 😉

He was working on my hair Sunday, yes he works Sundays and is doing so in the large metropolis of Heber, AZ, go figure, but I am not looking a gift horse in the mouth.

Anyway, we got into our typical discussion on TV and movies.

That was the passion of my youth, yes, I went to New York looking to make a career in broadcasting; only to realize at the tender age of 19 that if you weren’t Diane Sawyer or Connie Chung (yep I am really that old) broadcasting was a tough way to earn a living.

But Jeffrey and I share a passion for TV and movie consumption and he commented that he needed to get a DVR to get Netflix.

I said, Jeffrey you don’t have to get a DVR for that, you can get just about any BlueRay Player, they almost all have Netflix loaded into them.

Really, he said, with the wonder of a child.

Yep, although I want to caution you, if you are running satellite internet, you need to be careful.

I bought a Roku box right before Christmas and in one evening catching up on 9 episodes of House I consumed enough of my monthly bandwidth that the following day I was placed in rate-limit jail.

As if satellite internet isn’t slow enough, it took a month to get out of rate-limit jail.

As we spent some more time discussing Netflix and all the other streaming options, I said, do you remember how we used to watch TV?

We would rush around to make sure that if a favorite show was on Wednesday night at 7 pm, well that was exactly where you were and heaven help you if you missed it. You had to wait until it was on in re-runs to catch it again.

Honestly, I haven’t watched one of my favorite shows on its original broadcast day/time in a couple of years.

Between Netflix, Hulu Plus, Amazon Prime, DVRs and even having TV on my phone playing episodes on demand, I can watch while waiting at the oil change place, Dr.’s office or the parking lot of Mathnesium. Who needs to be tied to a TV guide!

This seems like a paradigm shift but as a bit of a geek, maybe it isn’t really as widespread as I think.

I remember signing up to have Netflix DVD’s delivered with no late fee and thinking that was awesome 7 or 8 years ago.

This technology reminds me of that Carl Sandberg poem a lot of us had to study in high school, The Fog, with the line The fog came in on little cat’s feet.

These technologies come creeping in quietly until one day you are fighting with your iPad trying to get Netflix up to watch the old BBC series you are currently hooked on blogging about the entertainment necessity of Netflix, when you really should just go to bed.

Jeffrey, on reconsideration, maybe a Kindle is a better choice for your next technology purchase…

Just a thought.