Netflix Instant is awesome but the biggest issue is still that so much content is missing, and even worse, somethings get removed from Instant! ( I'm looking at you Star Trek remastered first season, grrr ) Instant was a godsend to combat the Renter's Remorse we all felt when we didn't want to watch the movie we had a home, but it's so far from being perfect with the large swath of missing content.
I'm not completely certain why everything isn't on Instant but it would seem that one of the main reasons is to spurn on DVD and Blu-ray sales. If you can watch something on Instant than why would you ever want to buy it? Fair e-nough.
The great thing about Instant is that it's instant (duh), well more specifically that you can decide what you want to watch, then watch it right away with no snail mail delay. Instant gratification, renter's remorse is dead!
So you want it right now, and the copyright owners want you to painfully wait long enough that you eventually get fed up and buy your own shiny disc to love.
I think there's a beneficial compromise - here's my idea.
Create a new category of Instant content, call it Instant-less, and put in there everything not currently in Instant, then just stream it like Instant. Now everything is streamable to customers, and it's available right after they decide they want to see it. Yay for NetFlix users!
Ok, to make the copyright owners happy what we do is add a delay before you can do this again, a delay that mimics the physical constraints of returning a disc and waiting for another, the part I can only assume the copyright holders like. I don't know what this would be, but for me I can turn a disc around in 3 business days in the mail, so let's err on the side of caution and say 5 days, heck make it a week I'd be quite fine with that and so would my two week old copy of Sherlock Holmes. Yay for Copyright holders!
So, you decide you want to watch something that just came out on dvd, find it on Instant-less and enjoy it. Then 5 days later, come next weekend, you repeat it all again. All the while the current Instant content is still there to fill any other watching you want to do.
The Good
So here we have a way for users to have an even better NetFlix service where they no longer have to worry about renting something they don't end up wanting a few days later, and rights holders can still maintain the delayed gratification which they believe helps cause us to want to buy actual discs.
But there's more. This is even better for rights holders because it gives watchers the ability to impulse watch their content which they couldn't do before because the activation cost of putting something in your queue is a lot higher than simply clicking Play. If something goes in your queue it can unknowingly and accidentally end up in your mail box, so it has to be good to end up in your queue in the first place.
The Hard Part
Alright, now while that all seems fair there's the whole streaming part. Netflix doesn't have the rights to stream the content so they'd have to convince the rights holders that this would work and they can manage the delay lock out correctly so as to maintain the bottle neck in users getting content. It could be tricky, but maybe some studios would go for it, at least for a test.
The Details
There are now three ways to get content.
Disc
Instant
Instant-less
The first two don't change you still get all the current Instant content you want, but we add Instant-less as an alternative to the Disc option. So if a user is on a 3 disc plan, they could make that 2 Discs and 1 Instant-less watch
For each Instant-less watch a user gets:
1. They can't watch another Instant-less movie until 5 days have passed.
2. They can choose to rewatch the previous movie at any time in the 5 days but the 5 day period restarts again when they're done.
So if you have 2 Instant-less views you could watch a new movie on Saturday, then on Sunday through Wednesday you could watch episodes of a TV series from a single disc of that series. Then on Friday ( after your movie view's delay is up ) you could watch something new again at your whim. And if you also had a disc in your plan your kids could be watching Dora in the van the entire month long.
