I was looking at a Netflix flier on M’s floor this morning and remarked “Funny they say that the plans start at 4.99 per month when the 4.99 plan really isn’t all that useful.” Then I thought, well, the 4.99 plan is 1 movie at a time, 2 per month. How often do I really exceed that? Right now I can have two out at a time, but I barely watch one per month on average. I do like having the choice of two movies, but practically speaking I don’t need the plan I have. Except that if I were sick or something, I’d want to be able to watch a lot of movies quickly. But Netflix allows you to change your plan pretty much whenever you want, I think (maybe not more often than once a month, but still). You can get an extra movie for a pro-rated amount of the next-higher plan for the remainder of the month, if you decide you need one.

As I was thinking about this, I made a connection to the complaint made in Who Killed the Electric Car? that the car has limited range (and the EV1, specifically, also had limited space). I tend to be confused people’s attachment to having a car that goes hundreds of miles and stores four people and a bunch of cargo when 90% of the time they go under 30 miles and carry one person and a tiny amount of cargo (a job that could easily be done by a bike, SmartCar, or other small vehicle). But here I am, making the analogous decision with my Netflix account.

I told this to M and he remarked that it’s a principle of system design: do you design for peak load, or average load? And there’s a definite desire to design and select for a system that handles peak load, so that the system never fails, even under peak circumstances. If you have the extra resources, why not design for peak load? It’s a psychological thing. We want the system that never fails, so that we can have just one system, and not have to think about having multiple systems, or cleverly designing the system to reduce peak load. It’s a sensible decision in many ways. It’s just that sometimes the consequences are not desirable.

Can we convince ourselves to accept peak restrictions so that the overall system can be more efficient? If my Netflix choice is any indication, it’s pretty hard.