If you love watching movies on DVD and Blu-ray, you cannot beat the movie rental deal from Netflix. The Netflix service also makes a real nice gadget gift.

Netflix is an online DVD rental service with over 100,000 movie titles. We have been using Netflix for over 4 years and the level of service is the best we have ever seen.

Here is how the Netflix system works. You sign up for a monthly subscription. You can sign up for yourself or give a subscription as a gift. The movies that you want to watch are selected online and placed into queue. Depending upon which plan you are on, you can have 1, 2 or 3 DVDs at your home at any time. You can keep the movies as long as you want and never have to pay a late fee. Once you have watched a movie, you send it back to Netflix in a pre-paid mailer (you never have to pay for any postage) and drop it in the mail. When Netflix receives a movie, they mail the next available movie in your queue to you.

The pricing plans are inexpensive.

1 DVD at a time, no monthly limit	$8.99 per month
2 DVDs at a time, no monthly limit	$14.99 per month
3 DVDs at a time, no monthly limit	$16.99 per month

Do you have a Blu-ray player and prefer Blu-ray DVDs for movies produced in high definition? For $3 more per month you can set a preference to receive Blu-ray movies whenever they are available.

For any of the plans that cost $8.99 or more, you also get unlimited free access to Instant Movies that you can watch on your computer or though a Netflix-enabled movie streaming device, such as the Roku Netflix movie player. There are currently over 12,000 movie and TV program titles available for instant viewing. At this point, the Instant Movies are in standard definition, but many will soon be available in high definition.

So what’s the best deal? We like the $13.99 deal for two movie rentals at a time. We prefer Blu-ray movies, so our monthly rental fee is $14.99. If you like using your home theater, this is ideal for someone who watches two movies per week. We generally do that on Friday and Saturday night. On Sunday, the movies get mailed back to Netflix and usually by Tuesday or Wednesday we have the next two movies in our queue in our mail box. Sweet!

You can place as many movies in a queue as you wish. We generally select movies that look interesting as soon as they hit the theaters. That assures that we are at the top of the list as soon as the movies are available, which is generally the same day that they are released on DVD in the stores.

It’s hard to beat $14.99 for eight movie rentals per month (2 per week), plus we never have to stop at a DVD rental store and weed through the meager selections typically found at brick-and-mortar rental stores.

The only downside with Netflix movie rentals is that you do need a PC with online access to add movies to your queue, so it does not work well for parents or grandparents who do not have Internet access.