{"id":1281,"date":"2007-10-18T13:10:00","date_gmt":"2007-10-18T20:10:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/2007\/10\/18\/instant-heroes\/"},"modified":"2007-10-18T13:10:00","modified_gmt":"2007-10-18T20:10:00","slug":"instant-heroes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/2007\/10\/18\/instant-heroes\/","title":{"rendered":"Instant Heroes"},"content":{"rendered":"

NetFlix should seriously be advertising the heck out of this: You can watch new episodes of Heroes<\/span><\/a> via their “Watch Instantly”<\/a> service, the same week they air. No DVR or advance planning required. Hooray for convenience! (The bad news is coming. Wait for it.)<\/p>\n

The service had piss-poor selection when it launched earlier this year, but it’s looking much nicer now. Unfortunately, and here’s the bad news, the other problems still exist: you have to use Windows XP and IE6, deal with Microsoft’s crappy DRM<\/a>, and you have to stream<\/span> the episodes–no downloading for later offline viewing. So<\/span> Web 1.0. Are they gonna get a sock puppet mascot too?<\/p>\n

But it’s still marginally better than Amazon Unbox<\/a>, which forces you to install additional software<\/a> to manage their own<\/span> proprietary DRM. Also, you don’t have to pay-per-view for each show or movie on NetFlix; you get as many hours of viewing per month as the number of dollars you pay for your subscription.<\/p>\n

In my case, that’s seventeen<\/span> hours, and much more than my actual free time per month. But it’s nice to know that I could go online, fire up a browser, and watch Pan’s Labyrinth<\/span><\/a> or Time Bandits<\/span><\/a> whenever I want. It’s not perfect, but I’ve got to admit, it’s getting better.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

NetFlix should seriously be advertising the heck out of this: You can watch new episodes of Heroes via their “Watch Instantly” service, the same week they air. No DVR or advance planning required. Hooray for convenience! (The bad news is…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[32,56],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1281","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sci-tech","category-tv"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1281","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1281"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1281\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1281"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1281"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1281"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}