Goodbye eMusic, Hello (Again) Netflix
May 15th, 2010, 5:58pm by Mike
About 16 months ago, I cancelled our Netflix membership, since we weren’t really using it to its full potential, and it felt like we were throwing money away on it. In the meantime, I had kept my subscription to eMusic, which I started about 4 years ago. In the meantime, there have been quite a few changes to both:
Netflix has added Instant Viewing (i.e., streaming movies over the internet) to all accounts, and of particular interest to me, has made Instant Viewing work on the Mac. Not available on AppleTV (or Boxee on AppleTV), but I’m doing fine hooking my netbook up to our TV to watch soccer already. As Jake mentioned, it’s available on Tivo now, too.
Over the last 4 years, eMusic has raised their monthly price from $10 to $12/month, and lowered the number of downloads per month from 40 to 30. In addition to keeping up with new releases, they’ve also teamed up with some of the major labels to offer big back catalogs, so the price change didn’t really faze me too much.
What I’ve come to realize, though, is that subscriptions allow you to branch out and look at things you might not otherwise pay a la carte to investigate, and that paying individually puts up a pretty high barrier. In my case, I’ve pretty much gotten what I want from eMusic (for now), while I’ve built up a back catalog of movies I want to see — and I’d rather switch for a while to a movie subscription with a la carte music.
So, I got back onto the Netflix $8.99 for 1 DVD and unlimited streaming plan, and at the end of the month, I’ll cancel my eMusic account. I guess I’m actually saving a couple bucks in the process (and still exploiting that home internet connection while keeping only basic cable (which has skyrocketed 30% since last month, to $14.65! Yeah for XFINITY!).
My feeling is that I’ll switch back somewhere down the line, or if I miss eMusic, just add it back. Still much less than having cable!
To celebrate, last night I watched Moon, which I had wanted to see in the theater. I thought it was pretty good, and got me fired up about actually working through some of the many movies I’ve missed lately.