The holiday season is upon us, and gifts are flying from store shelves (and online merchant warehouses!) to you (and possibly on your behalf!). One great idea is a gift subscription to NetFlix – great for someone who hates hefty cable TV charges, and/or has a big-screen TV (or also gets one as a gift). And even if you didn’t get a new TV, if your TV is less than 3 years old it may have the capability to use NetFlix already built-in. Same if you have a fairly recent DVD or Blu-Ray player, Apple TV, Roku or any one of a bunch of devices sold to augment your standard cable box. So what is Netflix? Think of it as a channel to watch all sorts of TV, shows, movies, documentaries, etc. Not the very latest stuff either on cable/satellite, or movies that just left the theaters, but slightly older stuff. The Netflix library is massive, and you can watch anything you like, on-demand whenever you want.

So first, if you’re giving Netflix as a gift, you can buy a pre-paid Netflix gift card at various stores including Staples, Giant, Krogers, Best Buy, GameStop, Speedway and Target. If you’ve received a gift card, visit https://www.netflix.com/Gift and use the redeem code on the card to get your Netflix subscription going.

The really nice things about Netflix are:

• You can play Netflix on just about any TV, computer, tablet or smartphone
• You can setup sub-accounts for your family, so everybody can watch their own stuff

The only downside to using Netflix is tied to the speed of your internet connection (and/or choice of internet service provider). Your internet connection can most likely easily support streaming video – to one screen. But if you have more than one Netflix watcher, all watching something different (you in the family room, a child in their bedroom, another in the basement, etc.), you might see the ubiquitous ‘buffering’ icon.

To use Netflix on your big-screen TV, it needs to have an internet connection. Some TV’s need a wired connection, which may not be nearby. But most sold recently have wireless capability built-in, so you just need to connect them to your home wi-fi network. Almost all recent TVs have various apps built-in (including Netflix), and you can just switch from the cable TV to the NetFlix app, then start watching. And if your older TV isn’t capable of giving you those services, see if your existing DVD player has that capability. Or you can add a low-cost device like a Roku (about $50-$100) or Apple TV (about $100). Apple TV is great if you already use iTunes on your computer, because you can not only subscribe to various other internet TV services, but also rent or buy movies and TV shows from the iTunes store. If you want to spend less on something to watch Netflix with, you can get a Google Chromecast or Amazon Fire TV – these are ‘dongles’ that attach to your TV and let you play internet-based video services like Netflix.

Some folks are cutting the cable box entirely out of the picture, and just going with one or more internet tv services. For example, late-model Samsung TV’s have a SmartHub that offers NetFlix, HBO Go, Hulu Plus, YouTube, Amazon Prime Instant Video and a bunch more. The cost of a few internet movie and tv services is often less than what you’d pay to Cox, Verizon, Time Warner, or Comcast for basic cable and a movie package.

Lastly, Netflix isn’t the only player in town. As noted above, there are competing on-demand video services like Amazon Prime Instant Video and Hulu Plus, Youtube, and iTunes. Any of these also make great gifts! For the cable-cutter, the cost of all four for-fee services (Youtube is free), is probably less than your basic+movies cable bill.

We all complain that with today’s TV service, there’s 1,000 channels and nothing to watch. So the move to on-demand is a reaction to that feeling, where companies like Netflix are giving us pretty much anything we want to watch, anytime we want to watch it, and anywhere we want to watch it on. That’s a pretty sweet deal for less than $10/month!