{"id":9932,"date":"2010-11-23T16:36:56","date_gmt":"2010-11-23T16:36:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/?p=9932"},"modified":"2010-11-23T16:36:56","modified_gmt":"2010-11-23T16:36:56","slug":"netflix-guilt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/2010\/11\/23\/netflix-guilt\/","title":{"rendered":"Netflix Guilt"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

One of the paradoxes of how we record and watch films in the modern era is the stack of unwatched material that gradually builds up over time.<\/p>\n

Over the last decade, as home audiences replaced their videos with DVDs, a revolution gradually happened as the rise in\u00a0online rental services (Netflix<\/a> in the US and LoveFilm<\/a> in the UK) and PVR<\/a>s meant that audiences could timeshift their viewing.<\/p>\n

Online DVD rentals are paid for by a monthly subscription fee, so there are no deadlines to return the discs, and with a PVR you can record plenty of films for later viewing.<\/p>\n

But what happens when it comes to actually watching these films you have rented or stored?<\/p>\n

Back in 2006, an article in Newsweek by Brad Stone titled Netflix Guilt<\/a> articulated this modern\u00a0dilemma.<\/p>\n

Stone used an unwatched copy of City of God<\/a> to make his basic point:<\/p>\n

I had “City of God” in my possession for 11 months, during which I paid $18 a month for a three-DVD-at-a-time Netflix subscription.<\/p>\n

Finally, I returned the movie in defeat while delusionally re-adding it to the end of my queue. By that time, my wife and I were talking about a dangerous new force in our lives: Netflix guilt.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Since 2006, the problem has accelerated with movies on iTunes<\/a>, larger PVRs and faster connection speeds to deliver them to homes.<\/p>\n

The basic issue seems to lie in the enormous choice of films and how it is much easier to select what you want.<\/p>\n

Or, to be more accurate, what you think <\/em>you want.<\/p>\n

It is still hard for an individual to actually select something that hits their particular tastes.<\/p>\n

In other words, what we think we want to see, isn’t actually what we want to see, as this cartoon<\/a> points out:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

But it isn’t merely a case of mainstream versus\u00a0art house: often mainstream films that look promising turn out to be awful and more independent fare is gripping.<\/p>\n

Leaving aside old favourites, this means that the central problem still remains: how can we accurately select films we want to watch?<\/p>\n

It is clearly a pressing question for companies like Netflix, which is why they offered $1 million to anyone who could come up with an algorithm<\/a> to solve it.<\/p>\n

But even that ended up in a lawsuit about privacy concerns<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the best plan to cure ‘Netflix guilt’ is to just send those DVDs back or delete that film on your PVR.<\/p>\n

If you really wanted to see it, you would have seen it by now.\u00a0Right?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the paradoxes of how we record and watch films in the modern era is the stack of unwatched material that gradually builds up over time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9935,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,8],"tags":[1440,1686,1688,1687],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9932"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9932"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9932\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9935"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9932"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9932"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9932"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}