Netflix on the Wii

We have had the 1-movie Netflix subscription for some time. I have no complaints about the Netflix service--except that there is a critical weak link in their model--me.  We're not good about watching the movie and getting it back into the mail on a regular basis. We're also not great about checking what new movies they have and adding them to our que. So (because of me) their services has not been as cost effective as it could be, and I had been thinking about dropping the service.

This past week I signed up for their service that allows you to stream their on-demand movies and TV shows through our Wii. We received the DVD quickly and for free, and this weekend we tossed it into the Wii and tried it out.

I have to say, I was pretty impressed with this service.  It was very easy to navigate through the available titles, select the one we wanted and play them.  We enjoyed the movie Bedtime Stories which my kids were big fans of.  It was also fun to introduce my kids to the Rocky & Bullwinkle & Friends.  Viewing it on a big screen really highlighted how simple the artwork back then was, but amazingly none of my kids commented on it.  My 11-year-old daughter loved it, especially how the humor appealed to multiple age groups. Lastly, my youngest fell in love with some Swedish cartoon called Pingu.  I'm sure we would have never encountered this last program had it not been available on Netflix.

The audio and video came through without a hitch.  It would have been nice to have some sort of "Search" capability rather than having to cycle through the seemingly endless list of B-movies.  My only major gripe with this service is the selection that is available.  The on-demand movies available from the Netflix website are notoriously limited, and what was available through the Wii seemed to be a subset of that.

That said, there certainly are other titles we'd like to watch that I saw listed.  This is a far better way for families like ours to use the Netflix service.  If they keep adding content to this service (and not just endless B-movies), we may end up keeping their service after all.