Tikkabik

NetFlix did a cool thing recently when it allowed account holders to create multiple queues for each member of their family. The way it works is this: You set up new user accounts for each person who you want to share your subscription. Then you assign each person the number of DVDs you want them to be able to take out.

I've set up an account for Bonnie. We have a standard account that lets us have up to three DVDs out at a time. I've configured it so that I can pull one from my queue and she can pull two from her queue. She has a lot of series and stuff for the kids, so I weighted it in her favor.

This works out really well, because as it stands I have more than thirty movies I'd like to watch. Inevitably, she'll find a new obscure anime or a music video compilation, and she'll pop it to the top of the queue. That isn't fair to me, but now she has her own queue, and I have mine. I've got stuff that's been on there for six months or more that I haven't been able to see, because this keeps happening.

It'd be even better for occasional use if there was some way to tell it that certain queues should only pull every other time or every third time, but that's a minor quibble. The big problem I discovered after setting up Bonnie's account is that there is absolutely no way to transfer queued titles from one account to the other. In our case, that was a big problem, as she had over fifty titles of her own in the queue. She had to manually re-add them to her new queue and then delete them from mine. Seems like a grand waste of time -- even if they'd limited it to a "one-shot" deal where you could only transfer titles between queues when you first set up the secondary account(s), that would have helped.