geekosystem

Look, we all have a guilty pleasure show or two on Netflix.  A show that we love dearly, but don't bring up around company, because come on, really? I like to hope my friends and relatives would be shocked to find out how many episodes of I Shouldn't Be Alive or Quanutm Leap I have binge watched, for example. God knows I'm surprised by it. But pretty soon, no one will be surprised by any piece of shameful television you put in your Instant Watch queue. That's because by the end of the week, Netflix is going to be set to tattle on your viewing to your Facebook friends, leaving you with a lot of uncomfortable questions to answer about why you gave a 5 star rating to Say Yes To The Dress.

Netflix went out on a limb with original programming when they decided to bring House of Cards to the table. It might seem obvious now to some, but there was a time not that long ago when original programming  for purely digital outlets seemed out of place to many. Netflix reportedly hasn't given exact numbers, but they have said that it's their most-watched show. According to research from Cowen and Company, a financial services firm, it looks like Netflix's original content offering might be doing rather well for itself.

Without a DVR, pretty much all the programs we enjoy watching on Cartoon Network and Adult Swim fall well out of our regular schedule. Seriously, it's either they're on too early or too late, resulting in the desperate -- and oftentimes fruitless -- act of scouring YouTube in the vain hope that some copyright-infringing good Samaritan has uploaded the particular episode you missed. Thankfully, those days of watching grainy footage of Adventure Time someone filmed from their couch will soon be over since it's been announced that a library of shows from Cartoon Network, Adult Swim, and Warner Bros. Animation will be available for streaming on Netflix come March 30th!

You guys, have you heard THE BEST news? Word dropped last night that new episodes of Arrested Development will make their debut on Netflix sometime in May. That means you've got just a few short months to brush up on your Bluth family apocrypha before the debut by giving the show another watch through or ten. Conceivably, this also means a chance to watch it in the first place if you haven't already. There must be people out there who haven't, right? If you're one of them, go watch it right now. Yes, like right now right now.

I think at this point, more people know Blockbuster as a third-string Batman villain than as a video store, but the company still exists and they'd like to remind you of that fact with their new Android app. If you're an Android user with a Blockbuster account, though, don't get too excited. You can't stream movies to your phone with this app. Really. It just manages your queue for their mail service, which I was surprised to find out is still around.

Has it really been two decades already? On January 3, 1993, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine made its debut, making this the twentieth birthday of perhaps the most underrated show in the Trek canon. Just one more year until the show can go out for drinks with friends at Quark's Bar and wake up with no eyebrows and a throbbing Romulan Ale hangover. Until that embarrassing incident, allow us to make a brief argument for the show, and why you should spend this evening getting reacquainted with it.

If you were one of the 27 million people on Christmas Eve unable to watch a marathon of holiday specials via Netflix, well, now you have the reason behind this mass outage: The bunglers -- in Netflix's opinion, at least -- that manage the cloud over at Amazon Web Services. The childish game of corporate finger-pointing began when issues with Amazon's cloud knocked out the video streaming service of Netflix, leaving more technologically inclined families without festive entertainment from their mobile devices and other high tech gadgets.

Just when you thought it was safe to send your friends funny chimpanzee videos. Recently, the U.S. Senate presented President Obama with an amendment to the Video Privacy Protection Act that would allow Netflix to override the act's prohibition of disclosing one's video rentals without expressed consent and automatically posting them to the individual's Facebook timeline -- essentially letting the world know you rented Battlefield Earth on more than one occasion. In addition to this was a second amendment to a different act that, if signed, required the federal government to obtain a warrant before searching email and other content stored in the cloud. Approved not too long ago by the Senate Judiciary Committee, this amendment was cut from the legislative package, granting the feds carte blanche to continue to rummage through your private messages should it prove conducive to an investigation.

Earlier this year, Netflix's messy breakup with Starz resulted in an even messier custody battle, with the latter walking away with their entire catalog of Sony and Disney flicks. But now it looks like the world's largest provider of on-demand streaming media is on the rebound and has hooked up with the Walt Disney Company in a multi-year licensing deal. Cutting out the middleman, Netflix will now have access to the wonderful works of Disney and its subsidiaries, as well as no longer spending lonesome evenings waiting for the hot dogs to thaw in the kitchen sink.

One of the time-honored traditions of Thanksgiving for a number of people is the act of eating way too much before retiring to the local couch to quietly digest. It's a period of much reflection, and sometimes regret, but there's little to no actual activity involved beyond just sitting there, hoping not to die. We know that feel. So, to make the whole process that much smoother, here's five movies to watch instantly on Netflix during your Thanksgiving food coma.

As it turns out, people are using the Internet more and more. Shocking, I know. It's like it keeps growing, with more content always being provided and access to the web becoming easier, or something. According to a recent report, North American Internet traffic has more than doubled over the past year, with Netflix accounting for 33% of streaming traffic across fixed networks. Another very real possibility is magic.

Amazon's really wanting to bolster their Amazon Prime subscriptions, apparently. The annual subscription, which runs $79, wasn't cutting it for them. If you're the type of person that regularly purchases items from the online retailer, the annual account's worth it for the free two-day delivery alone. In addition to that, Amazon Prime also offers a collection of television shows and films that subscribers can watch, like Netflix. Also like Netflix, Amazon Prime's just added a $7.99 monthly plan. That means streaming plus all the other goodies associated with an Amazon Prime account for the same price as just streaming elsewhere.

If you're like us, you accidentally woke up early today before remembering that you had an extra hour to spare. Sure, we could have gone back to bed, but the coffee was already on. So instead of feeling lazy and crawling back under the covers, we did the responsible grownup thing and started watching TV on Netflix. In the interest of spending your extra hour productively by getting addicted to some high quality television, here are some of our best picks for shows that you should be watching (or revisiting) that you can stream right to your television or computer.

Horror movies and Halloween go together like football and Thanksgiving, or Christmas and screaming recriminations. No doubt plenty of our livelier cohorts will be doing things they can feel bad about posting on Facebook later on tonight, but for those of us who are staying in tonight like dang old grownups, we put together a list of our favorite selections for Halloween that you can access right from your Netflix Instant Queue. These movies are guaranteed instant Halloween -- just add a snack, an adult beverage of your choice, and someone to snuggle up with for the scary parts.

Netflix can be a pain for those that are unable to hear or have partial hearing loss. Their subtitles and closed captioning are haphazardly implemented throughout their Watch Instantly service. Some titles will feature robust settings while others have none at all. That's all set to change though. Thanks to the tireless efforts of the National Association for the Deaf, Netflix has agreed to provide closed captioning on all their Watch Instantly content by 2014.