The difference between Netflix’s DVD’s & what it streams
Bottom Line: Thankfully my wife Ashley still turns on the TV near daily to help justify the combination of DirecTV and Netflix services we have. I generally don’t find the time, though it’s baseball season, so I’d aspire to watch Braves games on the MLB Extra Innings Package we’re paying for if I did. I’ll probably get around to doing that this weekend. Anyway, on back of the fact that I’ve never watched less TV in my life and Ashley’s watching less these days as well, we recently went through all of our content subscriptions to see what we’re really paying for and what we actually watch.
Going through the DirecTV exercise was pretty incredible. When we first moved into our home seven years ago, we’d signed up for one of the top DirectTV packages (the kind that includes most things this side of porn). Turns out a lot has changed in seven years aside from our TV viewing habits. Going through our package we not only discovered dozens of stations we’d never watched that’d we’ve been paying for right along...I kid you not that there were well over a dozen we’d never even heard of!
We were literally able to cut our package in half without cutting out a channel either of us could even remember watching. So, heads up if you’ve been in set it and forget it mode. You may very well be in a similar situation and by the time we were done finding a package that made sense we’re saving about $100 a month over what we’d been doing. But about now you’re wondering what any of this has to do with Netflix. I’m getting there.
We’ve had Netflix for several years as well. First with the DVD service and then adding the streaming service – it's especially helpful for Ashley when she’s traveling. Anyway, the reason why we kept the DVD service when we added streaming a couple of years ago was the content selection. The bottom line was that the streaming library was only a fraction of the DVD library at the time. I went through that exercise again with Netflix to see if there really was a point to keeping the DVD service. Turns out – absolutely yes. In fact, if there was just one Netflix service we’d keep, it’d be the DVD service.
If you do a side-by-side comparison with titles, you’ll notice the difference pretty quickly but if you search around a little you’ll find this... According to industry experts there are fewer than 6,000 titles (movies & TV shows combined) available through the streaming service. Meanwhile the DVD service is around 100,000 titles. A little food for thought if you’ve been wondering or will be tempted to go through this exercise now that I’ve brought it up yourself.