Earlier this week, The Onion posted a parody documentary video on YouTube about the “Blockbuster Video Living Museum,” as if brick-and-mortar video stores were a thing of the distant past, a quaint relic to be remembered. Video rental shops aren’t quite dead yet, but Netflix and Amazon Unbox are each having a go, in their own respective ways, of making such retail outlets obsolete.
One new edge for Netflix, which prides itself on giving customers plenty of information about their movie-watching habits, comes from a third-party developer. FeedFlix is a clever new service that takes the readily available information Netflix provides in personalized RSS feeds (your feeds will appear if you’re logged into your Netflix account) and displays that info in more digestible format.
How fast do you watch and return your videos? Are you one of those Netflix dream customers that pays month after month, hardly ever watching and returning a disc? FeedFlix will tell you how long you’ve had each disc out, what you’ve recently returned, and what’s coming up soon in your queue. None of this is info you couldn’t figure out yourself with Netflix’s tools, but FeedFlix provides a convenient summary.
Beyond the personalized report, FeedFlix offers a public link that allows you to show others what’s in your queue and what Netflix recommends for you. These links reveal nothing about your identity, unless you post the links in a way that identifies you.
As more and more people join FeedFlix, the service has been able to generate fun aggregated info such as average rental length and shipments by weekday. (Not surprisingly, about a third of all shipments go out on Tuesday — replacing videos mailed back Monday after the weekend. Thursday’s the day Netflix ships the fewest videos out.)
Whether you use FeedFlix to see if you’re making the most of your Netflix subscription, or just as a fun diversion, it’s worth trying out.
