Brooke and I got into Lost awhile back after hearing things about it from a variety of people. Obviously, it’s a show that would appeal to me due to its many sci-fi elements, but Brooke had heard other people she knew that enjoyed it as well. I downloaded the first few seasons and we watched them in a few short months, in time to watch the 5th season last year as it was shown on ABC.
Well, the 6th and final season is set to begin February 2nd, so we thought we should watch it all again before the next season begins, especially while there’s mostly nothing on TV (due to the Olympics, primarily). We were able to watch some of those previous seasons on ABC.com, as the entire series is (kinda) available for free. I say “kinda” because we tried to watch them and, while the site says they’re available, they apparently aren’t working. Rather than download the episodes illegally, we decided to give Netflix a try.
We had been talking about trying Netflix for a few months now, mostly because many of our friends have it, but also because once we move, we we have toyed with the idea of not getting cable TV again. Netflix costs $9/mo and has a lot of material available. The real benefit of the system is that they added “Netflix Streaming” awhile back, making quite a few television shows (like Lost) available on-demand so we don’t have to wait for a disc to arrive before we can watch them. It works on Windows or Mac OS platforms, but in our case, I’m using it on my PS3, streaming the shows (or movies) in near-HD quality to the PS3 so we can watch them on the TV. I imagine we will use mostly Netflix Streaming, but it’s nice having the added catalog of DVDs (Bluray rentals cost $2 extra per month).
So yeah, Netflix appears to be a very worthwhile service, and it’s feeding our addiction to Lost. Win-win, eh?