Reverse Baader-Meinhof Syndrome

Part One
Some time ago I renewed my subscription to Netflix in order to utilize their streaming video service which is offered “free” to all their subscribers. The service is nice but the selection of movies available to Watch Instantly (their term for internet streaming) is a very small subset of the movies that they have on DVD. Because I’m interested to know of any additions to this subset, I subscribe to their RSS feed for New choices to watch instantly. With that subscription I receive notification in my web browser whenever a movie is made available for Instant viewing. This morning there were approximately 20 new movies available which I quickly scrolled through, clicking open a new tab for each that interested me. One of these was Yojimbo by the legendary Japanese director, Akira Kurosawa, who also directed the seminal Seven Samarai. After reading the description, I clicked the “Add to Instant Queue” button to save it for later viewing. Whenever you add a movie to your queue on Netflix they suggest 10 more related movies that they think you might like. This time, they showed me these (click to enlarge the image):

Netflix Choices

My eyes were immediately drawn to one of the movies on the bottom and in the middle, The Beider Meinhof Complex. The name was somewhat familiar so I read the description but it didn’t interest me so I closed the window.

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Netflix again

Back in 2003, we dropped cable TV in order to save money when I was unemployed. When my employment became stable again, I decided against monopolistic and customer-unfriendly Comcast and signed up with DirecTV. Part of the package included a dual-tuner Tivo with which I immediately fell in love. It didn’t take long before I had used up the 50 hours of available space and started to feel the pressure to watch my shows before they disappeared. As a result we dropped our Netflix subscription since we were watching Tivo all the time and never had time for DVDs.

2009 has brought the advent of the HD age to our household and things are changing in our content consumption. Before I purchased our new LCD TV at Costco, I promised myself that I would not spend a bunch of money after to make all our content HD. In fact, the main reason we got the TV was because of the Xbox. The impending HD switch-over was a consideration but not a big one because DirecTV provides our television content and they will continue to provide the same service for some time.

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