Netflix - more homework than entertainment?

As Netflix continues to be down today, I'm reflecting on the panic I felt when I saw this message on their site this morning...

What does this mean?  What happens to my queue that I spent so many hours perfecting?  As pathetic as it might seem, I had to calm myself down a little bit...  Anyway, it reminded me of a great article I read a while ago called "Netflix Guilt".  It's about how asynchronous entertainment (the ability to watch what we want when we want without being attached to a TV schedule) might actually be a move in the wrong direction, turning "entertainment" into "homework".  For example:

The digital revolution has introduced us all to the life-altering phenomenon known as asynchronous entertainment. We can now enjoy movies, TV shows and our favorite media sources wherever, whenever we want. But a decade into this monumental shift, the drawbacks are coming into focus. Episodes of “The Daily Show” and “Letterman” pile onto our DVR television recorders like copies of The New Yorker, begging to either be consumed or wastefully discarded. Netflix movies line up on our shelves like airplanes on a runway waiting to take off. And all of those blog postings relentlessly flood into our Web browsers every hour, every day. There’s certainly not time for all of it. Is this entertainment? It feels more like homework.

So as I wait to see if my queue is still going to exist tomorrow, I encourage all of us to reduce the number of entertainment homework we do.  You know, just to preserver our sanity in case a site goes down or our DVR's stop working...