If you’re like me, and for once, an astonishingly large number of you are, you recently suffered a minor Netflix outage. Discs were sent out late, confirmation came late if not at all, and the whole thing was a soup for about a week, reportedly the second time this year.

At worst, it was a minor inconvenience–I personally got an expected shipment about two days late–and Netflix was profusely apologetic, even going so far as to offer partial credits good for fifteen percent off your next month’s subscription, or a free week if you’re still on the free trial.  Me, I got fifteen percent.

In all honesty, this brief hiccup does not change my mind in the least about Netflix.  Indeed, they did everything they possibly could to make the experience positive, and their truly minor temporary outage really doesn’t cast any doubts on their perceived quality.  I still look at Netflix and its only real competitor at this point Blockbuster.com to be part of the future of video distribution, and there’s not a chance I’ll be cancelling my account.  I advise you all to do the same.

See, if Netflix’s advertising is to be believed, they’ve sent out, to date, better than ONE BILLION TITLES.  That’s basically three movies to every man, woman, and child in the United States and counting.  Their database is enormous at around nine million subscribers, and their reliability well-established.  Let’s be honest here–this is only the second time in a year this has happened.  Now think about your dealings with Netflix and then, ask yourself, how many times have I received a title later than expected?  If you’re like me, before this outage, you could count the number of times it’s happened on one hand, and the number of movies you’d received around that failure would require an entire kindergarten classroom’s worth of hands to count fully.  As a result, the error rate involved is catastrophically small.

Thus, my future source for movies, including my personal favorite horror movies, is going to feature Netflix heavily.

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