I just came across this interesting history of the Netflix mailer.

Where do they go from here? Obviously: downloadable movies. It's the last mile of video-on-demand and Netflix seems like the player (perhaps with some help from TiVo) to actually make it happen.

In their last quarterly conference call yesterday, they committed to having a solution in place by the end of the year. That's ambitious, if they hadn't already done some groundwork. I'm excited, because with this advance, the final three problems with Netflix disappear (the return time, unplayable discs, long waits for good movies) and the only real question becomes one of revenue. By this I mean that any idiots who subscribe to a "5 out at a time" plan will immediately ratcheted back down to 3, because if there's no wait on return times, you won't need to have multiple movies out at once.