Netflix is one of those things people rave about that I thought wasn’t for me. I mean, it requires tons of bandwidth and high speed internet; right? I had the following thought yesterday.

Well, I now have 15GB of bandwidth a month, which is more than enough for what I absolutely need to do in a month. Once I get my high gain antenna, the connection is going to be pretty fast. Linda‘s Dave says that you can choose the quality of the video to use less bandwidth. Maybe it’s time to look at Netflix at little more closely.

So I did. The first thing I did was Google was how much bandwidth a typical Netflix movie uses up. To my immense surprise, I discovered that Netflix Canada movies are up to two thirds lighter than an equivalent movie in the US because even hardwired internet up here has ridiculous bandwidth caps.

I signed up for a one-month trial membership and got some recs from my best friend about what to watch. To my disappointment, Canadians don’t get the same options as Americans (but of course) so I can’t check out about 95% of her recs.

I eventually found a movie to try, it played smoothly even with my slooooooow connection, and I discovered that it used up only about 250MB (the Mifi actually updates usage in real time!). I obviously can’t watch a movie every night and do other interneting stuff, but it’s not like I have time to watch a movie every night anyway.

If I watch two Netflix movies a month, it’ll be cheaper than raiding the $5 bin at Walmart ($7.99 versus $10). Their selection, even in Canada, is pretty good. So I’m fairly sure I’ll continue with a paid membership.

Is there anything else I need to discover now that I have a good bandwidth cap in Canada?