Netflix, Streaming Videos & DVDs

Rather than imposing ads on existing subscribers they offered a lower price subscription to those willing to suffer ads. Same result in the long run, but less irksome to customers.

I won't suffer advertising that moves or makes noise on any medium. Television advertising is banished from my personal universe.

If I can't make such advertising go away from a web site or streaming service I simply don't go there. If I think an ad free streaming service is too expensive I don't subscribe to it.

When my wife and I started Netflix it was $7.99 a month, no ads. Now it's $11.99 a month, but that's a lower bandwidth plan that's no longer available to new subscribers. Will I pay $15.49 for their new "standard" service? I don't know.

If I can't stream without ads, or the price of streaming is more than I'm comfortable with, it won't trouble me at all to go back to the DVD-only television watching my wife and I were enjoying before we had Netflix.

We haven't had cable, satellite, or broadcast television in our home for more than a decade now. When we first subscribed to Netflix we watched it on our Nintendo Wii. Our television's only other input was our DVD player.

We've used a variety of devices since then to access streaming services but all of them are increasingly obnoxious, filling the screen with crap as soon as you turn them on.

I'm thinking of building a system that starts up with only three or four icons on the screen -- the DVD player and whatever streaming services we currently subscribe to.