Yeah I totally agree Temptasia, it's just not quite there yet. Plus I don't know how I feel about watching my movies on my laptop screen. Just not the same watching Lord of the Rings on a 15" monitor !

but i have a mac and it dont work for me

For me, it's the selection that has always been clearly superior with Netflix. They just have more films in a larger catalog than anyone else, outside of old rental stores that still carry VHS cassettes (as there's at least tens of thousands of films on tape which have not and probably will never be transferred to DVD). Yeah, Instant Viewing is nice, but there are a lot of technical hurdles that get in the way for many people. oogellaboogella mentioned the OS problem: it won't work on the majority of operating systems. There's also a disk space problem: you need to install software something in excess of 1 GB on your hard drive in order for it to work. As you said, Temptasia, they've also got a strange selection for online viewing, which has to do (I'm reasonably sure) with political negotiations with the studios which own the copyrights. They have to OK the viewing, and the idea of having a lot of their high-demand material viewable on demand, as often as users want, has got to be worrying for them.

The selection of discs at Netflix is still the best, and that's unlikely to change unless something happens to the company (acquired by a competitor, goes out of business), and I hope that doesn't happen. The other thing I love is the multiple profiles...but I'll talk about that in another thread.

I have heard rumor of a box that will hook up directly to your television and allow you to watch the instant views without the download, so that's a plus.

So, returning to this thread after a couple of years (closer to three), I have to say that the streaming service is now completely vindicated. It exists on virtually every platform, and most people I know (and certainly every one in my immediate and extended family) watch the majority of their visual entertainment via Netflix streaming. It's weird how things can change so (relatively) quickly; back when Dave made his comment about watching on a laptop, I heartily agreed with him...but now I know it's been a very, very busy day where my family hasn't watched at least ten different programs on Netflix a day, and that's mostly due to the availability on our phones. While we have it on our PC, Mac and Xbox 360, we mostly use the streaming service on our handhelds. Washing dishes, folding laundry, balancing the checkbook - all the mundane house chores can and are performed with an episode of a TV show or, rarely, a movie playing on the phone. We're particularly delighted when we find worthwhile TV shows that have been or were on the air for many seasons, because then we have entertainment for a full week of chores. I'm much slower than my wife or kids with my TV viewing, so I've been spending most of this month on the 109 episodes of "Bleach," watching the first fifty or so episodes that I saw when they and Fanpop were new five years ago and then proceeding from there.

I, and pretty much everyone I know, use the streaming service constantly. The software is ubiquitous now - you'd be hard-pressed to find any sort of network-video-capable device that doesn't have a Netflix application, the software is MUCH improved over what was available in 2007 (the beginning of this thread), and Netflix has been tirelessly beefing up the streaming selection, to the point where it clearly rivals the DVD selection. In fact, I suspect that so much effort is going into improving the streaming catalog that the departments working to maintain and grow the DVD selection have been cut back: more and more films are "unavailable" rather than "disc-only."