Use FeedFliks To Easily Find HD Streaming Titles In Netflix’s Catalog

We’re hoping all of you are enjoying the bunch of new titles Netflix added to Streaming on Sep 1st after the Epix deal.

Some of you have written in asking if there’s a way to tell if any of these titles is available in High Definition. The answer is Yes, and starting today, you’ll be able to tell on FeedFliks if a particular streaming title is available in HD by looking for the small HD icon. Here’s what it  looks like:

You’ll be able to see this icon wherever you see title snippets. For example, The Pelican Brief and Runaway Train are available in HD Streaming while Nick of Time and The Running Man are in SD only.

Oh, and one more thing: HD Search. To the options where you could specify Instant or Blu-Ray, we’ve added the option to restrict your searches to only those Streaming titles which are available in HD. Look for this in the Format filter:

We hope you all find this useful. Happy (HD) Streaming!

 

Use FeedFliks Search to find only watchable titles

Watchability Factor

In an earlier post, we announced that FeedFliks was going to be start showing you a ‘sit-through factor’ which was a percentage measure of how much of a streaming title people actually got through.

We’re now allowing you to search Netflix’s catalog by using this as an additional filter. Right below the ‘Format’ dropdown (where we added Blu-ray last month) is a  slider you can use to set a minimum percentage value that the title should have been watched for.

Right now, this filter is applicable only to Instant Watch titles. However, with over 17,000 titles on Netflix Streaming, we figured everyone could use this to eliminate particularly boring titles.

If you’ve got any suggestions to make FeedFliks Search even better, please leave us a comment.

 

How many DVDs does Netflix lose?

HackingNetflix recently asked its readers how often they received cracked DVDs/Blu-ray discs. CNN also ran a story about a postal worker who got arrested for stealing DVDs. From that CNN article: “Netflix says that it ships 2 million DVDs a day. It was probably inevitable that some of them would not make it to their intended subscribers.” Just what percentage of these get back safe and sound to Netflix and how many are ‘lost’?

Over at FeedFliks, we use the Netflix API to pull users’ data over so we can help them maximize their Netflix membership.  It is possible via the API to find shipments that don’t have a corresponding return. Now these one-way-only titles can be so for a variety of reasons: you never got the DVD Netflix mailed out, or you got it and it was scratched/cracked so you sent it back, or you got it, it was ok and you watched it and sent it back to Netflix but they either never got it or got it very late.

Across millions of shipments for tens of thousands of Netflix subscribers, we found that only 0.3% did not make it back.  The remaining 99.7% are either safely back with Netflix or being enjoyed by subscribers at any time.

Just thought folks would be interested in that.

 

Blu-ray much?

If you have  Blu-ray on your Netflix plan, you can quickly find Blu-ray titles in Netflix’s catalog with FeedFliks Search. The Format picklist in search now has a new option for ‘Blu-ray Only’ which you can use to limit searches to Blu-ray titles. Happy Hunting!

 

Blu-ray adoption at Netflix

On the most recent Netflix earnings call, Reed Hastings, the CEO of Netflix said that Blu-ray adoption was ‘growing nicely’. In case you were wondering just how many of NF’s members actually go for Blu-ray and pony up the extra $1/month, just take a look at this graph. 

 

 

Netflix's Blu-ray Adoption

 

As of today (Feb 7, 2009), about 19% of FeedFlixers are on the Blu-ray option. Extrapolating this to Netflix’s 10M members, that would mean close to 2M members. Not bad at all. To see how this number changes over time, just bookmark this: Netflix’s Blu-ray Adoption.