My first objection with Netflix involved the slim pickings that are currently offered. Since then, I've taken a longer, more leisurely look at their selection via my laptop, and still remain unimpressed. Unless the inventory grows quickly and widely, it doesn't seem like a going concern to this potential customer.
We watched The Guild Season 3 last night, and the quality of the video was - to put it bluntly - just awful! It was jumpy all the way through, like watching an Internet video on your computer back when we were all still using dial-up. I did some testing this afternoon, and the first film I tried (Lost in Translation) suffered from the same deplorable frame rate. Wondering if the problem was related to the streaming of HD video, I picked a movie that I figured would be SD (Vertigo) and it looked fine. I also selected Terminator 2 (which might or might not have been HD) and it likewise streamed normally. So I'm not quite sure what to make of this particular issue. Right now it seems very hit and miss in terms of what assets it affects. However, with such a small percentage of the Netflix's library appealing to me to begin with, I can't really afford to have any of them be unavailable due to poor quality. So this seems like another nail in their coffin.
But I'll keep giving it a chance, at least through the 30-day free trial.
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I suspect there's some throttling on the ISP side causing the poor video quality. If so, that's a real deal breaker ... and something that Rogers/Bell have impressive control over, being able to protect themselves from a IP-based competitor creeping in on their market share.
I'm using TekSavvy w/ MLPPP so that my connection is not throttled (for other, more dubious reasons). The few HD movies/shows I've watched so far were crystal clear quality.
If your router shows bandwidth stats, it would be interesting to know what kind of throughput you're getting. I seem to recall Netflix saying that a high quality stream would eat about 1GB/hr.
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