I actually started a one month free trial of Netflix for this very reason. Totally worth the effort. Like you said, it started off slow but on the whole it was a good season, definitely hoping for more. I’m considering keeping my subscription for a month to support this initiative, but I probably won’t renew beyond that for two reasons:
1) HD support seems a bit buggy. Sometimes it would simply refuse to give me anything but SD. Also I had to go to my account page to even find the setting, which didn’t feel very intuitive.
2) Lack of a good keyboard-only interface for PCs. I don’t want to have to use a mouse with my HTPC. Netflix seems to have apps for all kinds of devices, why does PC have to be limited a stupid web interface? Or am I missing something? Give me an XBMC plugin and I’ll be a subscriber for life.

@ Jed:

Very good point. I wasn’t aware that Netflix is not available abroad but I guess that makes sense seeing how much of their content is probably tied up with silly regional contracts and agreements. It just goes to highlight another problem: regions no longer make sense.

The whole idea with region encoded DVD’s and staggered theater releases makes virtually no sense in the age of ubiquitous broadband and dirt cheep digital equipment. Once a movie or show is released in one region it will immediately leak onto the web. The best way to squash piracy is to preempt it and release your content worldwide on the same day. This is now entirely possible thanks to direct digital content delivery platforms but no one is doing it because network and movie studios are run by dinosaurs stuck in the past.

And you can bet the vast majority of people that -did- pirate it, are people in countries that can’t access Netflix.

I’m in Australia and there is no legitimate way to watch Netflix, and I honestly have no idea what the consequences are for getting around the limitations if you are caught. I guess the lowest punishment would be account banned, what I ultimately lose from that I’m not sure.

Either way, while Netflix access would be great, it has never been “I don’t have it so I miss out”, and yes you can say this about other things on other mediums (Game of Thrones comes to mind…) but sometimes it just gets annoying feeling like 2nd class just because you don’t live in USA. Especially when the whole idea of the internet is to be a world wide platform for sharing.

Now that they are having series that are (so far) exclusively on their own “platform” they need to expand access more than ever, because that is the main reason for the vast amount of piracy left. Of course there will always be people that get it free “because they can” or are in especially bad financial situations, but I can bet if you broke down the locations of the season 4 being pirated, >50% would be outside USA (I decided to low ball that for higher accuracy, I personally expect more).