I finally, after many years, cancelled my Netflix membership today. While I love the company and enjoyed their service, it wasn’t something that fit into my life right now. The easiest way to say why is that I still have a movie that we received in December, 2006. Yes, in 12 months I never got around to watching the third DVD. No, I’m not kidding and yes, I’m not proud.

On a related note, primarily because the elimination of the monthly Netflix fee pays for it, I’m going to pick up the smaller Apple TV tomorrow. There are two reasons for this. First, the movie rental service that Apple announced is closer to my dream of on demand all the time video and makes it more likely that we’ll actually rent movies. When I had a more regular schedule, Netflix made a ton of sense… now, finding two hours to spend with Heidi on the couch is often a surprise occurrence. Comcast’s OnDemand service was perfect for that, but since we switched to DirecTV, no more OnDemand.

The second reason we’re going Apple TV is that my XBox 360 setup I described a month ago isn’t quite as good as I hoped. The main problem is weak playback controls and library navigation in the XBox 360 media player. Basically, I can’t make playlists with the video, nor can I view any descriptions of the video shared to the XBox. Not sure if this is a Connect 360 issue or an XBox 360 issue, honestly, but it’s an annoying problem. It showed up most dramatically after I put Season 3 of Lost on my computer from my DVDs. The episode titles don’t have numbers in them and showed up in alphabetical order on the screen. Want to watch the season in order? Good luck.

Audio playback suffers from similar goofiness. I can’t remember exactly what I ran into, but some basic playback issues are there. I think I couldn’t fast forward a song, just skip forward or back between tracks. It’s a weird issue, and it’s just dumb.

We have an Apple TV at work which I’ve used a LOT late at night by myself. The device has its own limitations (720p, lame remote, runs hot as a toaster), but it does a great job exposing the playlists and functionality of iTunes on the TV. I can deal with the 720p thing, for now, and the remote should be a non-issue because of my awesome Harmony remote. It supposedly works with the Apple TV, so I should be able to continue using the single remote for everything.

Anyway, quick update on the whole home theater experiment. The new TV was mounted on the wall today. Love it up there, but it did confirm all the evils of having 100-year-old plaster walls.