Many Americans have begun to reexamine the way that they watch movies and TV shows because there are so many options out there these days. In the past, people generally had cable or satellite TV subscriptions, but some people are choosing to opt out of those plans these days. People have started to look at different ways of watching movies and TV shows online and some have been lured into different plans based on various free trial offers. Although many of the new ways of watching TV shows and movies have been touted as innovative, many people who have tried those ways of watching entertainment online have decided that they don't quite measure up to other ways of watching entertainment programs.

Netflix is a relatively new way of getting entertainment that has been fairly successful. The draw of subscribing to Netflix is that people can rent movie disks one, two or three at a time, through the mail. Subscribers can create a list of movies online that they want to watch, and then the company will send them disks through the mail as they arrive. The problem with this, however, is that it obviously takes a few days for the mail to get to the subscriber and for the subscriber to send the mail back to Netflix. That means even after you decide upon a movie you want to watch, it can take quite a while for you to get the opportunity to watch it whereas you can always turn your satellite TV on at any point to watch a movie without waiting. Long waits become an even bigger problem if there are a lot of people who want to watch the same movie because there may not be enough movies in the system, and you may have to wait a long time for people to send the movies back in.

Netflix has tried to address the problem of long waits by creating an online streaming system. Subscribers can go online and click on any movie and then watch it instantly. While that can be an improvement over waiting for the mail to arrive, it still doesn't quite compare. People who have tried this system quickly realize that the movies that are available for online viewing in Netflix's library are much older than many of the films they could watch on satellite TV instead. Additionally, many people's internet connections aren't quite fast enough to display movies being streamed instantly, which means the video playback quality can be poor, and most computer screens are much smaller than regular TV screens. Even though services like Netflix have been hailed as groundbreaking by many, there are currently too many drawbacks for these services to replace older and more reliable formats like satellite TV. With a satellite TV subscription, people have access to hundreds of different movies that are airing at all times of the day and night, and those services are even more flexible thanks to the power of DVRs, which enable viewers to record movies and TV shows for playback at a later time.