The Enduring Value of Netflix by Mail

Thu 31 Mar 201109:32 AM

I’ve been thinking about Netflix’s Instant Watch service lately, how it’s fueled such tremendous growth for the company, and how it’s no secret that the company’s future lies in streaming on-demand content and not in its traditional business of delivering content on disc via the postal service. In fact, new customers looking to sign up today might be forgiven for thinking that Netflix is primarily a streaming service and that its mail delivery service is just an afterthought, so strong is the company’s marketing emphasis on the former.

At what point will Netflix stop delivering discs by mail and focus solely on streaming? For a lot of us who have been Netflix subscribers since the time when discs-by-mail was its only service, the assumption is that the company won’t make this definitive switch until such time as they can stream about as many titles as they can deliver by mail. I couldn’t find definitive numbers, but it seems generally accepted that the company currently streams somewhere around 20,000 titles from the 90,000 or so that it claims to carry. By any measure, its streaming catalog is currently just a fraction of its disc catalog.

Facebook, For the Win

Thu 3 Feb 201104:32 PM

Listening to What Movie Lovers Have to Say

Wed 12 Jan 201104:30 PM

In my post from earlier this week about the drawbacks of Blu-Ray, one of the points I tried to make was that all of the extras that Blu-Ray discs provide really amount to very little of interest to me and, I would guess, to most consumers — especially if they cause the total user experience of Blu-Ray discs to be slow and problematic (they do). Contrary to what the entertainment industry believes, most of us can easily live without all the deleted scenes, interviews, outtakes, trailers, and commercials disguised as documentaries — to say nothing of the uniformly dismissable interactive features and supplemental content that Blu-Ray makes accessible over the Internet.

What matters is the movie itself, the core content. If you don’t believe me, you can believe Netflix. Through their success they’ve inadvertently proven that the concept of “DVD extras” is hardly a necessary component of providing good entertainment. Their discs-by-mail service treats a two-disc movie release (one for the movie itself, one for the extras) as two different rentals, and so it’s probably safe to say that very few people go to the trouble of renting that second disc. And of course, their streaming service offers up no extras at all and has proven to be a big hit nevertheless.

In an age where entertainment journalism is so popular and when everyone is interested in the backstory of practically every movie, regardless of how good the movie itself is, it’s interesting to me that extras can be regarded as so inessential. But they really are, and user experience designers across all media would do well to keep that in mind. Cherries don’t sell sundaes.

Annals of Crime

Tue 28 Sep 201006:28 PM

Manhattan’s Film Forum cinema house kicks off a three-week festival of classic heist flicks on 1 Oct, a celebration of that oddly comforting movie genre that provides the vicarious thrill of watching the planning, execution and (usually) unraveling of elaborately conceived crimes. You can find the full schedule and more information at Filmforum.org. These sorts of movies were among the first films to really capture my imagination as a kid, and I have a great fondness for them. In fact, in more highfalutin moments, I like to claim them as a minor inspiration for my interest in design — there’s a vague but visceral connection between their emphasis on puzzle-like narratives and the act of designing.

At its most basic, the structure of a heist film is an echo of the design process: a problem is identified, plans are developed, a team undertakes its implementation, and the story climaxes on the heist or the execution of the design itself. The dramatic tension of that final act defines the genre, but it’s the lead-up, the intricate preparation, the clever inventions and novel insights into the problem that provide the bulk of its raw pleasure to me. As a designer, there is for me a familiar echo of the work that I do in creating a solution when I watch on screen a cadre of experts — the safe-cracker, the sharp-shooter, the explosives expert — gathered around a blueprint of a bank, running through their plan of attack. Who doesn’t secretly want their work life to be like that?

Origins of “Inception”

Mon 19 Jul 201002:55 PM

Among the many interesting things about Christopher Nolan’s superb new movie “Inception” is the fact that it borrows so clearly from so many genres and yet seems to belong to none of them in particular. Its premise of dream-surfing pyrotechnics is heavily sci-fi and yet the movie is conspicuously absent of any specific technology (as cannily observed by Jeremy Keith). In many ways it’s a modernized espionage thriller of the sort perfected in recent years by Tony Gilroy, including of course the “Bourne” trilogy he wrote as well as the corporate cloak and dagger of “Duplicity,” the underrated romantic spy comedy he directed. It clearly owes a debt to heist films as well, but feels less like a romping caper like “The Italian Job” (in either of its two incarnations) than the comparatively quiet and primitive choreography of “Le cercle rouge.”

A Metallic Taste

Thu 25 Feb 201011:20 PM

Slow to Judge

Wed 17 Feb 201011:03 PM

Watching Movies When Not Watching Baby

Mon 25 Jan 201011:12 PM

Since becoming a dad, I’ve been able to go out to the cinema to see just three movies in three months. Luckily, at home, the situation is a little better, thanks to Netflix, Apple TV and the new Blu-Ray player that I got for the holidays. Still a general lack of free time makes it hard to see as many as I’d like, and I feel lucky that I get to see any movies, let alone write about them here on this blog. The days of being able to knock out lengthy reviews of the sort that I once did for, say, last year’s “Public Enemies” or 2008’s (still underrated!) “Speed Racer” seem a long way off now.

I still like writing about movies though, still enjoy articulating my thoughts about them, trying to get at the core ideas in filmed media that matter to me. Whether or not anyone really likes them, or whether the generally design-centric audience for this blog finds anything relevant in them, I’m not sure. But writing about shit you like is one of the perks of having your own blog, so I’m going to keep doing it — when I can. I’m just going to have get used to writing more succinctly, and get over the embarrassment of sometimes only publishing my thoughts long, long after the movies have left the current spotlight. Here are three write-ups to get started.

Conversation Pieces

Thu 13 Aug 200903:09 AM

The other night I watched Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 psychological thriller “The Conversation” for the first time, I realized, in at least fifteen years. In the intervening decade and a half it had always stayed in my mind as one of the most delicately effective, nearly pitch-perfect movies I’d ever seen; Coppola had just come off of making the first “Godfather” and would go on to direct its even more ambitious sequel right afterwards, so “The Conversation” fell right into that sweet spot in his career where he truly was, as his sister Talia Shire put it, “The best director in the world, period.” There’s not a beat in this movie that doesn’t seem perfectly timed, that’s executed with anything less than tremendous care and wisdom and, more than anything else, that’s emotionally accurate. It’s a bull’s eye of a film if there ever was one.