I find it worth it for things like Futurama, Firefly and Arrested Development alone. I used to like their anime selection but pretty much all the good stuff went with Starz for their paid-by-advertising Manga streaming channel. Come to think of it a lot of good stuff went with Starz. Sometimes you get more recent and big budget flicks too like some of the Marvel superhero movies and The Hunger Games, though I'm no fan of the latter. Right now you can watch The Avengers but I don't know if it's regionally-restricted.

Samurai Champloo but no Cowboy Bebop, Netflix? For shame.

A lot of the foreign films I've watched have turned out pretty damn awesome too.
Two movies I would definitely recommend are The Good, The Bad, The Weird and Fish Story. The first, as you can probably guess, is a western chase movie but it's set in WWII-era Manchuria. Fish Story is pretty unique, the story of my solitude, if my solitude were a fish; or rather how a Japanese punk album saves the world.

The Host is also a pretty good monster flick and Karate-Robo Zaborgar is a hilariously weird parody of Super Sentai shows but I wouldn't place them as highly as the two other movies I mentioned. I've been meaning to watch Troll Hunter at some point as well, looks interesting.

On my internet connection I can pull in 720p on Youtube with no interruptions if its during off hours. If its during the Internets busy hours, then its not going to happen. I have to either be happy with 480p, or double the time it takes to watch it in 720p. With Netflix I can pull in 1080p at all times of the day, it just takes a minute or two to ramp up to it during busy hours. Obviously there are tons of factors that go into all this, so your experience may not be the same.

Cost to whom? I meant that people with a bit slower connections could watch streaming videos also in 1080p, as long as they allowed you to buffer enough of it to your own device. I'm not sure if you were thinking of buffering the video stream to ISP servers or something?

I think Youtube used to work differently before, ie. you could just pause the video in the beginning and wait until it has buffered the whole video into your hard drive, and then watch it without any pauses.

Nowadays at least to me it seems to buffer only a small part of the video, if I pause it at any point. It doesn't continue buffering all the way to the end.

So buffering 1080p feed over a slower connection should be possible in Netflix?

I got the opposite impression from their local web pages, where they seemed to state that you simply can't watch 1080p stream at all (but 720p or even less), unless you have a 10+ Mbps connection, and your ISP has an ongoing agreement with Netflix (maybe related to the ISP offering higher priority to Netflix data, or buffering Netflix video on their servers in advance?).

To Netflix. Netflix has to pay for the bandwidth that it uses and ultimately 1 minute of video uses the same amount of bandwidth whether or not it's actually watched.

But, it does seem silly seeing as it can't possibly account for very much compared with the bandwidth used to watch an entire movie.

We've actually had to bar people from using Netflix at the B&B because it crashes our system. I would be a little more sympathetic to them but I'm afraid I have no pity for people who take a vacation to the North Woods and then spend it downloading movies.

It depends, 5mbps might be enough, but it depends how oversubscribed the bandwidth is and how much buffering is involved. If you're reliably getting 4-5mbps through the entire movie, that's different from having a connection that dips down to 1mbps at times due to competition for bandwidth.

Im reliably getting around 5 mbps. My connection is pretty stable. Its actually supposed to be a 6mbps connection, but its DSL, so I don't actually get 6mbps.

Oops, I didn't know that, that's what I get for assuming that Sony's PSN network charged fees for Netflix. I guess the "booby prize" goes to Microsoft then ;p

I'm not a netflix fan.

I had a one year free trial that they canceled one month in because they wanted to bill and then refund every single month forcing me to keep a CC with them even though I was paid up for a year. Whereas Hulu lets you pay with prepaid gift cards. I also don't like how little of a selection you can see before signing up and the last time I was a member there were some basic account features that you could not modify.

My preference is Amazon Prime. Its cheaper and it includes free 2-day shipping and a free ebook every month. They carry Dr. Who, Fringe, Lost, Alias, and many other popular shows and movies. You can view their entire selection before ordering and you don't have to keep a payment method on file once you pay up front.

Hulu is a stretch because they have commercials and their movie selection is incredibly lacking. Addtionally, they can't seem to keep their shows. Instead of carrying entire series, they are losing the rights to earlier seasons.

Currently I'm using both Amazon Prime and Hulu, but am going to let my Hulu expire as its become more and more disappointing.

Good luck with whatever you pick.

I have been keeping my eye on Amazon Prime. It currently doesn't have much stuff I'm interested in that Netflix doesn't already have, but its growing. I don't think it will be much longer before there is enough unique things on it, that in combination with the free 2 day shipping deal, will make it worth getting. When I get it, ill still keep my Netflix. In order to get the channels I would actually watch on cable it would cost me over $100 a month, so I would still be saving big even with both streaming services. There is only one cable provider where I live, so they don't have to price competitively. I actually have the opposite opinion on the yearly subscription though. I would rather pay by month, and Amazon doesn't even offer that ability.

Im totally with you on Hulu. Last time I used it they had a great free service, but Hulu plus was not really much of an upgrade. It still has commercials, and Im not big on most of the shows that I would have more episodes of. The only thing it does that I actually care about is being able to use Hulu on my PS3. and that ability isn't actually worth any money to me. For some reason, when I stream content to my PS3, it looks way better than with my PC. My PS3, 360, and PC are all hooked up to the same TV. When most content is running in 1080p on a console, it still doesn't look as clear as on PC, regardless of AA and AF settings. DVDs, and Streaming content always looks way better though. Very crisp and clear on a console, but a little bit fuzzy looking on PC. Maybe I just don't have something set right? Anyway, It would be a nice feature to have with Hulu, but I wouldn't actually pay money for it.

If you can live with their shady policy on things:

[1] Netflix reserve the right to disclose personal info, no notification.
[2] Movies can be removed at any time (due to, again, other licenses)
[3] They sometimes crop movies
[4] Its based on Silverlight, more or less excluding Linus users. (But they plan on moving on to HTML5)
And finally, we outside US has even less movies/series to chose from.

...then go for it.
I don`t know what the cost is where you live, but we have to pay 79 NOK a month, with 1 month cancel (was 3 months). And several have reported the quality to be less than desirable.

If you get 1 month to cancel, when you sign up - then try it.

[1] http://tosdr.org/#netflix
[2] http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/netflix-losing-1-000-titles-month-6C9690352
[3] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2368232/Netflix-criticized-secret-heavy-handed-cropping-movies-leave-characters-screen.html
[4] http://www.engadget.com/2013/04/15/netflix-silverlight-html5/

I didn't even know that, but now that I think about it, I cant really recall any movies being in that more widescreen than 16:9 ratio that most movies are in these days. Its not the sort of thing I would notice though, so I cant be sure. I would prefer they didn't do it, but its not nearly as bad as cropping it down to 4:3 like the old days. I suppose it also does make the service better for some people too. I live in an apartment building with a lot of elderly residents. They are all having to upgrade to widescreen HDTVs now. A lot of them seem completely unable to grasp to concept of aspect ratios. They are constantly fiddling about with zoom button on their remote, trying to get the image to fit the whole screen while also not making everyone look fat. In the end, they usually prefer the stretched image fat people over the correct aspect ratio if there is going to be black bars.

Yes, and get Chromecast to get 3 free months. Its a really great new service!

https://play.google.com/store/devices/details?id=chromecast

I have it in the U.S., people here still complain about it, though I'm not sure why. It's like 1,000 times the value you get from, say, renting on demand or buying a DVD/Blu-Ray. Over the past year, there are at least 12 old TV shows that I have watched in their entirety... from season to season 8 or 9 or whatever. If I had bought them that probably would have cost me $700 or something. Instead, Netflix membership for the year was about $100. That's not to mention all the movies I've watched, probably 1 day on average, as I like to have it on in the background while I work.

Now if you're one of those people that is ONLY into the latest hits, definitely do not get that, as Netflix has very little when it comes to new stuff. But if you don't mind watching 80's, 90's, 00's stuff then it's perfect.

Of course it depends, as they have different content in Brazil, I suspect they have less since they haven't been there too long. In the States, though, it's amazing.