When the evening forecast calls for fierce winds, icy roads and inches of snow, date night can turn south in a hurry. Thankfully, Netflix, along with a device to stream the service, can turn what would be a chilly night right around. But what’s the best app to make sure your queue is stocked with all the movies you want to see? There are plenty of options out there, so let’s take a look at a few.
If you’re simply looking to stream movies right off of your iPhone, the official, self-titled Netflix (free) app does an admirable job. It doesn’t hurt that it doesn’t cost anything to use as long as you already have a subscription to the service, but it’s organized well, too. You can find movies using category searches or a more open-ended search and the playback is as good as it could possibly look on your iPhone.
My personal favorite Netflix organizer is iQueue Free – Netflix Queue Manager. iQueue doesn’t let you stream off of the app, but it does let you add things to both your instant queue and your disc queue with ease. You can read descriptions of the films before you add them, and reordering your queue is easy, too. It’s a little more in depth than other queue managing apps but it works incredibly well and rarely has problems loading the items already in your queue, something that can’t be said for a few other Netflix apps.
Apps like Queuetastic – Netflix Queue Management ($1.99) for instance, sometimes get stuck when attempting to load a user’s queue and instead shows only an empty page where a list of movies should be. Queuetatistic was my go-to Netflix app for several months but recent updates haven’t done the product any favors. If you can avoid spending a few bucks on an app that only works about half the time, you owe it to yourself to do so with the glut of other options available.
The home that has multiple accounts might want to look into iPhlix – Netflix Queue Manager ($2.99). It has the features of most other queue manager apps but throws in the ability to switch accounts like you might switch Twitter handles. While that might not be a huge factor to some people, there’s no doubt that it would benefit larger families or households with more than one account.
And if typing in the name of a movie proves to be too much work, you can always give Q Scan Lite for Netflix (free) a shot. Q Scan lets you scan the barcode of a movie to automatically add it to your queue, so next time you’re out shopping and you catch a DVD you missed in theaters, you can grab it, scan it and walk away having saved yourself from an impulse purchase.
No matter which of these apps you end up using to pick your next flick, at least you can count on enjoying your movie without worrying whether the person sitting behind you is ever going to stop talking. I hope.
