I love movie previews. I think I like them so much because they are often better than the movie. You get to see all the good scenes stitched together with a clip from some great song. You laugh, you cry, all in three minutes. Better yet you never have to see the movie and find out they were the only good scenes in the movie. You can watch a preview and feel tremendously optimistic about a movie’s potential. Once you watch it, your unbridled optimism is crushed by the reality of bad movie

To feed my addiction I spend a lot of time over at  Apple’s trailer site. I appreciate the consolidation of previews but it has limited value given I have click through each one and then wait for each trailer to buffer. So imagine my delight when Zeller pointed me at a new Netflix preview feature he worked on (and recently released to the wild). The team figured out a way to do real time previews (no buffering) at a great resolution, and they deliver them in a rolling stream. Best of all the previews they show you are based on their recommendation engine, and you can add movies to the queue without leaving the preview itself. After watching about a million previews my only complaint is sometimes it goes to the next preview before I can add one I liked to my queue. I’d like it if there was a way to add the previous movie to the queue while watching the next.

I highly recommend it for anybody who enjoys previews (or uses Netflix).

http://www.netflix.com/Previews