There Will Be Blood is by all accounts an excellent film—but I can't confirm this, because the Netflix DVD of the movie has been gathering dust atop my DVD player since April. That's when it arrived in the mail, but I haven't watched a movie on DVD since then. Why? In a word, streaming.

The udder runs dry

Between content—mostly atrocious kids shows like Caillou—stuffed onto a DVR, access to The Simpsons and The Daily Show via Hulu, and nine bucks a month to Netflix for unlimited streaming, there's little need in our household to actually pop in a disc of any kind. Hence, the presence of that red envelope atop my DVD player.

It's people like me who are confirming recent comments by Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, who says that streaming will be bigger than DVDs at Netflix in under two years. Although the company says that all formats are growing in usage, the tremendous growth of streaming does suggest that Blu-ray will never become the huge cash cow that studio backers hoped to milk for decades.

While digital disc formats like CD and DVD proved unbelievably lucrative for the music and movie businesses, successor formats haven't fared well; DVD-Audio never caught on, and Blu-ray appeared just as streaming began to take off. The fact that Netflix can already stream programming in HD using just a few megabits per second means that Blu-ray's technological superiority will matter only to some; most others will soon find online streaming plenty "good enough."

This wasn't a surprise to Netflix, of course—as a recent Wired profile pointed out, "There was a reason [Hastings] called the company Netflix and not, say, DVDs by Mail." But it does mean that the company's secret DVD processing warehouses will eventually scale back and shutter altogether. (Though given the fact that my public library still carries audiocassettes and VHS tapes, the market for DVDs and Blu-ray could be around for a long time yet.)

Abundance and its discontents

In our house, the shift has had two curious effects. One is that we watch more video. It's easier to see shows, there's more to choose from, and you never have to worry about scheduling—but the dearth of commercials on Netflix and Hulu (which shows only one per ad break) also means that it's now possible to watch three "half hour" shows in just over 60 minutes. With a full show only consuming about twenty minutes and entire seasons available for watching at once, episodes feel more like snacks than like full meals—and everyone knows how easy it is to just keep snacking.

The second effect has been a move to shorter-form content. This may be peculiar to our situation, but full-length movies have quite limited appeal now. Part of that is two small children who awake early and aren't down until 8pm; do you really want to spend the couple hours of precious free time watching a 2.5-hour movie like There Will Be Blood? Our answer is increasingly "no," driven in part by the easy availability of on-demand episodes of TV content.

But part of the reason also seems to be psychological. Just knowing that I have ten different TV series—all of excellent quality—queued up on the DVR and Netflix induces a low-level, free-floating sense that these are "tasks" that need to be crossed off the to-do list. And "making progress" on a TV series is easier than watching a movie; indeed, a single hour can knock three episodes of 30 Rock off the list.

This is part of the burden of an on-demand world, the flip side of the blessing of abundance. The same feeling creeps in whenever I've tried "all you eat" music subscription services like Rhapsody in the past; it's awesome but also too much. Not having to make any meaningful choices about which music to buy and keep makes it simple to explore, but it also can also mean that "difficult" albums never get a repeat listen. They might not even get an initial listen, actually; after thirty seconds of two or three songs, one might be ready to move on. Again, the attention span for sitting with content gets shorter unless it provides a more immediate gratification.

With a hundred top-quality pieces on content in an on-demand queue, it's easy to crash at home after work every night and watch something excellent. Even twenty years ago, when one was bound to a TV schedule and the only option for getting a movie was a drive to the video store, there was enough "friction" involved in trying to watch what you wanted that it might be easier instead to read a book, go out for a drink with friends, or work out. On-demand streaming makes high-quality video content so easy to access that we might legitimately wonder about the effects it will have on a society that already proves just how alluring are moving images on a screen.

On the other hand, such worries have attended technology since the invention of the gramophone, which was corrupting the sound quality of music, putting orchestras out of work, and turning music into background rather than foreground entertainment. Yet we're all still here.

Still, every time I walk past the DVD player, I wonder what I'm missing with There Will Be Blood, and when I'll find the 2.5 hours to find out.