Yeah I was pleasantly surprised at the price drop, its funny the email they sent everyone gives the impression that they dropped prices out of the goodness of their heart. HAR HAR!!
Netlix isn't perfect but I love them just for the depth of their catalog, I mostly rent documentaries, cult and independant films, and concert movies and they have huge selections of these. I've read that with Amazon on the prowl now that Netflix is likely to be a big takeover target for them.
The price drop wasn't so much in anticipation of Amazon jumping in the game as Blockbuster's entry. IIRC, Netflix is now $18 and Blockbuster is $17.50. I'll easily pay fifty cents more to piss on Blockbuster! Plus Netflix has given me great service in the six months or so I've been with them.
"Vegetarianism for me is about saying ‘yes’ to things - even meat." - Coupling
I'm guessing that's total. It also says a lot about how well Blockbuster came into the mail order rental game as Netflix has been around a heck of a lot longer than Blockbuster...
"Vegetarianism for me is about saying ‘yes’ to things - even meat." - Coupling
Blockbuster & Hollywood Video only have themselves to blame for the existence of Netflix. When DVD was first released, neither of these chains carried them because they thought that the low sales price of discs would ruin the rental market.
At the time, Circuit City was touting DIVX with the fact that you didn't need to return discs.
Netflix saw a nationwide hole in the market for DVD rentals and filled it, quite well I might add.
#SDNY he's all yours. -- Michael Steele 5110 Posts 3/03
Posted - Feb 27 2007 : 7:39PM
Overall, it works pretty well. But it ticks me off that they don't give you the option of specifying that you don't want a movie if they're going to have to ship it to you from Outer Mongolia. I'm on the one-at-a-time plan, and I'm an hour away from one of their hubs; I don't want to have to wait four days for anything. Just send me the next one in my queue.
Not working on Saturdays is kind of lame, too. Even bankers work on Saturdays nowadays.
That is actually a problem with having a successful buisness plan - technology changes the market, but because people stick with what worked they don't look to exploit profitable niches. In this case, if DVDs were so cheap their video tape rental buisness would have gone under too, so there was actually nothing to lose. Still, big buisnesses could do well to ask how they would attack the market if they had to start from scratch against industry giants - especially when technology and social factors change.
Whenever they ship me one from outer Mongolia they send me an extra one from my local hub. They won't send a replacement until both are returned but it give you one to watch while the one is in transit from Mongolia. I have the 3 discs at a time though so they may have different policies for that plan.
Did Netflix rent video tapes through the mail too?
One thing to keep in mind about the transition from VHS to DVD in rentals is that the movie studios had two different pricing tiers for rentals vs. retail product for VHS. A single copy of a rental tape might cost $75 - $125 where the same movie would sell to a consumer for $19.95 - $24.95. That two-tier pricing system didn't occur with DVD. I think this enabled businesses like Netflix to succeed in DVD.
Then that was blind - all they could have hoped for was to slow down acceptance. Ford may not have offered cars in colors other than black, but they don't have a 98% world market share anymore either.
Then all they were playing for was slow obsolescence, gradually consolidating locations and hoping for sucker buyers before the end came - not so may type writer companies surivived as such (others diversified).
Silly buisness plan. When market factors change, people need to look for hole - how a new buisness would compete - and then start a division doing exactly that.
That's exactly the kind of approach we're taking with this site. DVD ain't going to be around forever so ADT's business model must change in order to survive.
Surprisingly, it was only recently that the last telegraph office closed down. Yes, I know they added other service, but between phones and credit cards, you'd figure it would be dead long ago - but it survived well into the e-mail age.
I'm thinking about joining either Netflix or Blockbuster online in order to be able to rent HD DVD's & Blu-ray discs.
However, I'm not sure if what I want to do will work. I'm hoping that their software is smart enough to allow me to put both the HD DVD and Blu-ray version of titles that are available in both formats into my queue and realize that since they are both actually the same title, only to ship one of them if it's available.
The perfect solution would be if they had an option that let you select the title and then the preferred format of that title, while allowing for multiple preferred formats.
I know that this is a long shot. But does anyone know if either one of them could handle the situation where I might say that I want "The Departed" either on HD DVD or Blu-ray, I don't care which, but don't send me both.
From what I've seen of how Netflix allows you to do I don't think this would work with their system. However at the current time HD-DVD titles ship immediately there appears to be no wait time. When a SDVD title has a short wait I've changed to the HD-DVD/DVD Combo format when available and the title has shipped right out. Hope this helps a little.
That would probably depend on the answer to the question that Drew asked earlier...Did Netflix ever rent video tapes? If so, that option was probably one that would have made sense back then.
If they didn't handle video tapes, then, being that the thing that allowed them to exist was the creation of a new format, it would have been very short sighted of them to build a system that assumed that there would never be another transition to a new format.
Even though few people have both HD formats, everyone who has one of those formats can also play standard DVD's (upconverted to 1080i or 1080p, depending on the player). So the same condition where someone might not care if they get the HD or Standard definition version might be something that a larger group of people might be interested in.
I moved on to Blockbuster.com a couple of years ago - for me it totally kicks Netflix. It used to be that they gave you 2 coupons a month for free rentals in store. Then late last year they offered free rentals if you returned your mailer at the store instead of dropping it in the mailbox thereby doubling the amount of DVDs you might see a month. I use that option a lot to see TV shows on DVD.
But I was a big supporter of the whole Netflix thing when we first got our DVD player back in 1999ish. I remember buddies not getting it and even online stock market buddies saying that the whole Netflix business plan was flawed. I guess the thought was that cable on-demand or internet would through Netflix on the trash heap. It hasn't happened yet and is many a year away.
#SDNY he's all yours. -- Michael Steele 5110 Posts 3/03
Posted - Mar 13 2007 : 10:49PM
Two weeks in a row these bastards have done this to me. I mail the last movie to them on Saturday; they get it on Monday, but do nothing until the following day, when they ship me a movie from the east coast, which I don't get until Friday.
I joined Netflix about a year ago, but didn't have time to watch films and cancelled my membership. I guess I'll have to rejoin. One thing's for sure. I'll never support that evil company Blockbuster as tempting as in store exchange sounds.
Works surprisingly well despite the Microsoft DRM hurdles you have to jump through. Quality is quite high in full-screen mode with minimal buffering time on a fast enough connection (>1.5Mbps). Selection is pretty weak (only 2 out of 55 titles in my queue are available in Watch Now), but they're starting to add a few good titles here and there. The price is right...don't know if I'd actually pay for it though.
This is actually better than the complaints that I've read about Blockbuster Online. Apparently, for a given address, they will only send a movie from a few locations. If none of those locations have the any of the DVD's that you want, but other locations do, you will not get any DVD's until one of the local distribution centers has one of your DVD's returned to it. So, rather than getting one of the DVD's in the queue sent to them from somewhere else, people are not getting any DVD's at all until they are available locally.
It sounds as if Netflix is doing something similar. But rather than waiting indefinitely for your DVD's to be returned to one of the local distribution centers, if they're not not available by the next day, they ship one from a distribution center where the movie is in stock.
Your reply was 3 years later! I was wondering where they had gone. First webjade died and then they did. Is there ANY place online that rents other region discs that are in the USA?
Stacked 14 - review by Captain Jack
Posted - Oct 25 2004 : 9:05PM
