Netflix Streams to iPhone

I know I’ve been tech heavy lately but I had to say something about Netflix for iPhone.   Ok, ready?  You know Netflix?  It’s on iPhone.  Why are you staring blankly at me as though bored and slightly amused by my enthusiasm? Hm.  Maybe you aren’t understanding me.  Netflix now streams to your iPhone (and one assumes other smart devices).  Watch anything in your instant queue.  Watch anything else that’s available for streaming.  On your phone.  Don’t be all unaffected and nonchalant.  This is seriously cool.  You don’t think so?  How about this then?

I’m at the end of a business trip (already this has stretched into fiction).  I’m packed and ready to go home, but I have half an hour to kill before the taxi comes to take me to the airport.  I’m sitting in the hotel lobby, bored.  After my virile display of business acumen, I’m too amped up to read.  I open up my computer, bring up Netflix in my browser and start watching… I don’t know… Jaws.  About the time the kid with the super-creepy mom becomes a stain in the Atlantic, the cab pulls up and I hop in.  It’s a little cramped in there, so I pull out my iPhone, open the Netflix app and there, in my instant queue, is Jaws.  I don’t have to start from the beginning.  No fast forwarding.  It knows where I left off and begins playing with the kid’s half eaten raft washed up on the sand.  A few minutes later, around the time Mr. Holland finds the severed head, I arrive at the airport.  I check in, satisfy the needs of the fear-ridden populace, and sit down in the terminal.  Now I have a choice.  Laptop or iPhone?  Laptop.  But… Jaws may be a little bloody for an airport terminal.  Maybe I’ll watch an episode or two of Family Guy instead.  A little while later l’m all Stewied up (it’s the one where he and Brian have some shenanigans and Lois gets mad at Peter) and they call me to board.  Now, I like to sleep on a plane, which is handy, because not all planes have wi-fi.  But if my plane did have the WEE-fee, as my father used to like to call it, I could have watched Roy Scheider smoking a butt, suggesting a craft of greater tonnage, which might have been more appropriate to the task at hand.  Right.  I land safely and grab another cab to take me to my ticky-tacky free bedroom community.  Twenty minutes and one dead Islander later I’m home, wife kissed, kid tousled, vodka poured, sitting in front of my big ol’ TV watching Chief Brody turn oxygen into fruit punch as Jaws streams through my Xbox… in HD.

Guess how much I had to pay for this remarkable experience.  Nuthin’.  Well… I paid them the eleven bucks a month I’ve been paying them since my local Blockbuster became a dry cleaner and a Chinese take-out.  I get Netflix on about 147 different devices and it costs me exactly zero dollars more than it did when they were just sending me a Blu-ray every once in a while.

So it’s cool, right?  See?  I knew you’d like it.  We’re gonna get along, you and I.  I can feel it.