Case of the Mondays?

That saying is somewhat stuck in my head as my oldest happened to watch Office Space for the first time on Netflix the other day.

Of course, I'm actually not too rundown this morning.  I had a good weekend - tons of gaming (some mobile games like Rage of Bahamut, Marvel: War of Heroes (both of which are having events right now) and Guardian Cross), plenty of Madden (two of my three online franchises have been humming along), doing work on my MUD (we have a Merriment of Masks festival.  Anyone out there recall what MUDs are or remember seeing my post on them like two years ago?), a little Mass Effect 3 multiplayer, some Pure Chess against my dad and some Super Smash Brothers with my son (first time I've used my Wii in probably three months).

All that fun makes it that much harder to come in today though.  Hence, my case of the Mondays.

However, my particular train of thought this morning actually relates to that lead I gave: Netflix.  And Hulu.  And even Amazon Instant Video.  I noticed something on Saturday that gave me pause.  I hopped on my Xbox 360 and saw that out of 14 friends online, 11 were watching some sort of video service.  Last that evening on the PlayStation Network while one of my friends and I were doing a huge round of Madden (including a first season Superbowl with him using the Packers and me using the Jets - I won that 28-27 with a touchdown run with about fifty seconds to go and even Tweeted the result here.  Helluva game.) that we both noticed the majority of our friends lists were watching Netflix and Hulu.

That made me get up and look around the house between games.  My wife almost exclusively uses our PS3 for Hulu and Netflix (we tried Amazon Prime's video service but did not like it as much during our one month free trial of Prime).  I strolled into the den, where my son was playing on his 3DS - or so I thought, but upon closer inspection he was watching Futurrama on Netflix on the device.  My oldest was watching Sherlock Holmes on Netflix in the living room.  My youngest was playing on the computer in the nook.  No Netflix or Hulu - though she was watching Youtube.

Between my buddy and I, we have 28 friends on PSN and 21 of them were watching Netflix or Hulu.  There was some overlap on our friends lists and we didn't want to sink a whole lot of time into our on-the-fly study (there was more Madden to be played after all), but this morning on the drive in it got me thinking.  Ever since the Playstation 1 was playing CD's and the PlayStation 2 was playing DVD's, it felt like game consoles were trying to make themselves a more central part of the 'entertainment center'.  PlayStation 3 pushed that notion with Blu-ray and Microsoft tried with HD DVD and now both systems along with your PC, Wii and some handhelds also provide Hulu and/or Netflix.

I know I complain a bit about how the newer systems seem to break down more than the older ones.  They run hotter, they have more moving parts with CD versus cartridge - things like that.  However, they do provide a broader sense of capabilities too and probably run for a lot more hours of the day.  I am not a real big TV or movie guy myself.  I like to go to theaters once or twice a month and I have a fairly decent collection of movies, but most of the time if I'm in front of the TV, I'm playing a video game.  Still, even in my household it looks like our systems get used for a lot more than just gaming.

What about you?  Have you seen this trend as well where over half your friends online are watching these services on their systems as opposed to playing games?  Do you yourself subscribe to and use one or more of these services?  Thanks for reading and have a great week!