Not really, I see mail as a temporary problem. If Netflix Streaming contained all the top titles, I would use that almost exclusively. There really would be no reason for mail, it's slow and inefficient.
What's nice about mailing physical media is that the movie studios don't have much control. You can buy a widget and do whatever you want with it, including mailing it around.
You can't do this on the Internet, though, because computers are magical and Someone Could Copy It!1111!!
Right. It may be temporary, but how long it's temporary is something that could really hurt them. Hardly anything I want to watch on Netflix is On Demand, and I already hate Sundays.
Netflix and Redbox cut good deals in exchange for those windows -- they pay less for the discs, and Netflix got expanded licensing for its streaming service. First sale rights aren't at issue. Just look at the Weinstein Company discs that announce "this disc for sale only" before the opening credits, which Netflix happily buys and rents out.
you would think they would catch on that physical media is easily copyable where the instant downloads aren't so why not do instant for everything first then DVD.
They do. But they release it to Pay-Per-View and On Demand services for more money than they get from Netflix, then they get Netflix's money anyway.
They view Netflix as more of an analogue to the "TV Syndication" stage of a property's life. Until Netflix has a 'premium' club paying more for early access to new material (so that Netflix can pay more in streaming license fees), they'll continue to see it as such.
I'm about to move from a place with 18Mbit down to a place with 2Mbit down. I expect my use of Netflix Watch It Now to drastically decline.
Mail is only a temporary problem if you define "temporary" as "ten to twenty years". There are plenty of people still stuck on dial-up.
Nobody is going to run fiber ten miles outside of a city of 20,000 people just for me, and apparently the movie studios don't trust me enough to slowly pre-download Watch It Now movies during sleeping hours.
Netflix's streaming is reasonably efficient; one forum user mentions that HD streaming consumes 3.8 Mb/s (http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=1115352), which is comparable to what I see on my Tomato bandwidth graphs (~4.0 Mb/s). I have a coworker that lives out in the middle of nowhere. He gets ~1 Mb/s and lives on Netflix streaming.
So you're probably not doomed. That being said, I am against any reduction of USPS service and in favor of caching Netflix Watch It Now movies, as you have mentioned.
Seriously. If Netflix instant streaming and the iTunes TV store supported closed-captioning, I'd seriously consider canceling my cable TV and going with those.
Unfortunately, I'm starting to think the only thing that's going to get consistent CC support in online video is a mandate from the federal government -- that was what it took in the early 90s to get caption decoders included in every TV 13" or larger.
This is one of the few cases where I think making a law would be a good thing. It sucks that things like closed-captioning have to be forced, but it seems they rarely happen naturally. Maybe because everyone knows the law is coming, so why bother (because you will have to change your scheme)?
You can't do this on the Internet, though, because computers are magical and Someone Could Copy It!1111!!