Netflix starts streaming Mad Men, tries to win back your love

Now that Netflix has alienated half its subscribers with a 60% price increase (depending on your plan), they need all the good news they can get. So they're probably extra-excited to begin streaming all four seasons of Mad Men tomorrow. (Granted, it's not the most popular show on television, but among the MacBook-toting/Netflix-subscribing demographic, it just might be.)

Netflix actually sealed this deal back in April, at a reported cost of nearly $750,000 to $900,000 (which by itself repays about a third of the three-million-per-episode the high-production-value show costs to make, incidentally). Will it reverse their sliding public perception? Maybe, but they'd better up the streaming quality if they want people to pay for it; the last thing I tried to watch (Brian De Palma's The Fury, for some reason) was fine for thirty seconds and then started looking like an AOL RealMedia clip from 1997. (On the other hand, at peak hours, Netflix Instant reportedly uses 20% of North American internet bandwidth, so there may not be much they can do.) Bottom line: hey, it's Mad Men. It can't hurt.