Watch Now Bonus Viewing Time

Prozac discovered that you can watch an entire Watch Now movie, even if you only have a little bit of time left on your account. "I had just 43 min. left on my Netflix Watch Now account and I noticed that Netflix will allow you to watch the entire movie uninterrupted as long as you don't leave the Watch Now page. So you can pause it and fast foward and watch a 3 hour movie if you have limited time on your account as long as you don't leave the page. I just finshed watching And Justice For All with Pacino with only 43 min. left and hod no problems watching it."

Comments

[CJ]

Somewhere in the desciption of the Watch Now service, NF says this feature is at their descretion. I assume it alleviates writing programming logic to compare your time left against the movie length before every Watch Now transaction. And how many people are going to be gaming this system to watch that one additional movie per month anyway...

[prozac]

I think it's a nice thing.

[Hunter McDaniel]

I ran my WatchNow account down to 40 minutes last month, and they put up a message saying that I could still start and finish a longer movie as long as I kept the session alive. Didn't have time to actually test it out.

As CJ said,they probably just wanted to simplify the programming.

[Edward R Murrow]

Maybe they don't have a software engineer on staff that could do the difficult math required to convert hours to minutes then perform the subtraction operation?

[Ryan]

Or they just want to be nice and let you see the ending of a movie your 3/4 of the way through. :)

[Hunter McDaniel]

Edward, it's not a question of math but rather of where in the process they put the check. Checking against your limit continuously during playback requires a much more complicated design than simply checking when you enter the viewer. And since the most by which you could exceed their limit is the length of one movie, they decided that wasn't enough risk to warrant the more expensive design. Makes sense to me.

Have you ever done software design?

[Edward R Murrow]

I was making a joke. Of course they have software developers who can do simple math. Gosh, you Netflix people are *so* serious. Lighten up and take another swig of the Netflix koolaid.

[prozac]

Have to admit...that Netflix koolaid is some fine sugary stuff.

[type-cast]

"how many people are going to be gaming this system to watch that one additional movie per month anyway..."

Why look at it as gaming the system? If they let you do it, you're not gaming the system. They can always start charging you if you go over the limit. It makes more sense to round up than to bill people for going over or cut them off. It probably works out to less than 10% extra time, on average.

[Edward R Murrow]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drink_the_Kool-Aid#.22Drinking_the_Kool-Aid.22

I personally like the grape flavored that Jim Jones served at Jonestown. Drinking the Kool-Aid helps me blindly embrace stuff so that I don't have to think things through for myself or try new things to figure stuff out for myself.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troll_%28internet%29

In Internet terminology, a troll is a person who enters an established community such as an online discussion forum and intentionally tries to cause disruption, often in the form of posting messages that are inflammatory, insulting, incorrect, inaccurate, absurd, or off-topic, with the intent of provoking a reaction from others.

[Edward R Murrow]

Oh, no way! I thought a troll was that thing that lived under the bridge and prevented two goats from crossing the bridge. Eventually the troll took an ass whipping from Big Billy Goat Gruff.

Come on man, lighten up. Most things in life should be treated as a goof. Especially movie watching.

tit for tat eddy.

[Edward R Murrow]

=)), sam said "tit".

glad to see you are keeping your intellectual discourse at the same grade school level as usual.