It wasn't an April Fool's joke. The previous contract with FOX expired on April 1, which is why instantwatcher.com had them listed as expiring. A new agreement was made with FOX, and announced yesterday, with the addition of Glee and some other shows. The new contract runs through April 1, 2012.
Nope, the site now lists April 1, 2012, as their expiration dates (since the extension with FOX is a one-year deal -- and that's pretty standard, really, as I'm not aware of any streaming arrangements Netflix has made which extend beyond one year, and most are six months).
Okay, so the Fox shows are back and were just a rights thing, but why is the streaming, queueing, and searching of the CBS shows not all working? Do you think Netflix has bit off more than it can handle now- jumping into original content before it has the infrastructure to handle the streaming influx they themselves created? I think it might be neat if Netflix were to make deals to stream or rent material that is not available on DVD as yet, or secured the rights to material that may have been discontinued. To me, as someone who likes older things and often has to wait for I swear sometimes they only have one copy of one thing, this might be a good way to make a new niche for themselves. As opposed to original content and more shows that nobody has the time for. What if Netflix got into film restoration and preservation? Or signed on independent film like Criterion? There's lots of other ways for them to go without getting crazy and ahead of themselves. And let's face it, they are getting ahead of themselves if so many folks are now having trouble with them.
Yeah, Star Trek, Frasier, and a couple of other shows still aren't up yet, and the ones that are, are coming along slowly. I don't expect everything to work at the drop of a hat, but Netflix doesn't really talk about their timetables in any appreciable depth.
I'm having issues with the Roku box. See, since Netflix has combined so many television show seasons, the Roku box takes much longer to load. For example, Cheers has 275 episodes. It takes about 5-6 minutes to load them. I'm hoping it gets faster in the future. There's also the issue of each episode playing after the previous one. As it stands, if I'm watching episode #200, at the end instead of going to #201, it jumps to a random episode.
Perhaps your Roku box needs a firmware update? I have my Playstation 3 hard wired to my router, Netflix runs like a dream. Takes about fifteen seconds for that list of 275 episodes to load. It also highlights the very next episode if I'm watching a TV series.
My Roku box was updated last week with the 1559 revision driver. It does not need a new update (I just ran update again just to make sure).
It's some of the series and not others. I don't think it has to do with different accounts. And it's like this on both our PS3 and Roku box.
Last week, I reactivated my membership after putting it on hold for a few months. All of my 400 physical discs and 20 instant titles were gone from the website queue, but they still had the titles stored somewhere. They were able to mail me the next two discs from where I left off the next business day. I called customer service about getting access to the queue, and they said that it would take about a day to get all of my titles loaded. They underestimated a little, but I am thankful to have my queue back after seven days. It beats rebuilding the list from scratch. I really, really like the condensing of TV series on Netflix, and I hope all of the instant TV shows do this. When I'm browsing for recommendations or navigating through my online queue, it's much better to have one title instead of multiple titles. It does mask the fact that some seasons have a very limited sampling on some shows, but that beats offering nothing on instant from those seasons.