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I agree that adequate broadband would solve this, and so many more problems.

I don't think that will happen for years at best, and then only for urban areas. For the bulk of the population, downloads are the only long term solution.

Let's be honest though, there's no real justification in ignoring the option to download. Again I compare to Steam and their model.

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IMO, the short term solution is for Netflix to let you buffer more of the movie. There is a lot to be said for instant play, but if they reserved a reasonable slice of your bandwidth to an ever larger buffer they could all but eliminate stuttering after the first few minute of a movie. I mean they already have adaptive quality based on bandwidth, so I see no reason they can't do the same thing while trying to build up a 10+ minute buffer by the middle of the movie if that's more important to people than a minor change in quality.

Right now I see at most a four minute buffer. That's one thing I would like is the ability to change. Or the ability to specify my bandwidth settings so that I could allow a HD movie or tv show to buffer at higher quality for longer if my connection wasn't good enough and then start watching when there was enough of the show buffered.

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