Netflix Streaming - Not That Great

Yesterday I signed up for a month's free trial of Netflix streaming.  At first I was excited.  They have all the "new" Doctor Who episodes through Series 5.  They have all the Avatar cartoons as well as all the original Star Trek episodes.

They don't stream Babylon 5, though.  In fact, I don't think they stream anything WB: movies and shows.

We tried streaming through the Wii.  That was fun, but the video was choppy (less than 15 fps).  We got our best result by plugging the laptop into the TV.  On the most part, it was like watching a DVD, but every now and then, I noticed a slight pause in the video.  One show was pixelated for a few seconds until I suppose the buffer caught up.

We watched The Sorcerer's Apprentice for our afternoon movie.  Then when the kids went to bed, I decided it was time to watch a movie with the wife.  But, what to watch?  This is where I come to my first complaint about Netflix.  Is there no way to see an exhaustive alphabetical list of all their streaming offerings.

We started typing in recent movies.  Source Code, Unknown, Speed Racer, etc.  Every movie we tried, Netflix reported: "xxxx is not available to watch instantly.  Watch xxxx on DVD."

Then I said, "What about a really old movie?"  We tried Casablanca.  No dice.  It's only available on DVD.

We ended up watching The Shadow (1994).

So, doesn't Netflix have any "cool" movies that are available through streaming?  The way things are looking now, we're either going to have to add DVDs (pay double), or go through someone else like Blockbuster.  Netflix's streaming selection leaves much to be desired.

Update 8/16/2011: We decided to go ahead and add the one-DVD-out-at-a-time plan.  At $16 a month, this is still a pretty good deal.  Little by little, I'm finding more shows that I like on streaming.  My kids love it.  The Wii streaming appears to work sufficiently well unless you try to do HD streaming.  Still, the streaming selection could be greatly improved.