Having Netflix doesn’t change your movie viewing habits beyond the honeymoon period unless there are other adjustments in your life. If you enjoy watching films or watching television series on DVD – and you do this quite often already – then Netflix will probably be a service that you get your money’s worth from.
However, if you don’t watch many movies now and you’re only considering subscribing because you imagine you’ll watch a whole lot more because it’s more convenient, you probably won’t, at least not after the honeymoon period (where you watch a flood of them at first).
That’s not to say no one who subscribes to Netflix doesn’t begin to watch more movies – I know of at least one person who unquestionably does. However, Netflix wasn’t the root cause of that change. That change in how he spent his time was a personal choice to spend more time watching films than to engage in other activities, such as World of Warcraft. This could have been done without Netflix at all – Netflix merely made his new hobby substantially less expensive.
This is really similar to some of the findings from the research we did at Magazines.com about the room people have in their lives for entertainment and recreation and how, in order for people to be willing to commit to more subscriptions, they have to be willing to make room in their lives from the other ways they spend their time.
I love movies. I will always make time for good stories told well. A video is worth a thousand words.