Netflix
I thought I'd try Netflix for a couple of months and catch up on watching movies and then cancel. So far I'm impressed: I joined Sunday and got two movies in the mail on Tuesday. I sent one back Wednesday and got the next on Friday. I did the free trial a while back and they were shipping everything from California. Now they have a center in Duluth (but I couldn't get another free trial).
It's $20 a month to have 3 movies out a time which probably means you could watch a movie every other day if you watch them the day you get them and mail them back the next. They pay the postage both ways. They have options where you can pay more and have more movies out or pay less and have 2 movies out a time (but that plan is limited to 4 movies per month).
You keep a backlog of things you want and whenever they get a movie back from you they send the next on the list. So you don't have to keep going back to the website to pick movies. They just come automatically as long as you have movies in your queue.
It's a very neat idea and seems like it should be very efficient using bar codes and automatically generating e-mails.
Read the follow-up posted in December.
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Comments (3)
There's a balancing act between trying to get a good deal (consuming x # of movies) and spending too much time watching movies.
I like your idea of using the service for a month or two to "catch up". Might work around holidays or vacation for me.
Is this unethical though? It's like renting a car with unlimited mileage to drive half way across the country and back. They don't really mean unlimited...
Posted by Jeb | August 19, 2003 11:08 PM
It's another Friday night and Kathy and I are thinking about renting a movie. I wanted to reference Ted's Movie Database (which should grow now that you are doing NetFlix.) That was a half hour ago. Since then, I did a Google search for "Ted Cashin" to find your Sprint Factory home page. It's on about the 3rd or 4th search page under all of your DOT, Atlanta MUG, and Salon quotes. Not wanting to have to do this much work in the future, I added your home page to your MT Links side-bar category. You can edit these links yourself using the Main Index template. Now... off to search for a good movie recommendation.
Posted by Bro Jeb | August 22, 2003 7:48 PM
I've done Netflix for a month. I got 12 movies in that time. But not without some difficulties. The new dog chewing up two DVD's when they came through the mail slot was not really the fault of Netflix and I was glad they charge a reasonable $20 to replace a "damaged" DVD. Also it's hard watching a movie every other day. And if you get one you're not real sure about (Amelie in French with subtitles) then you might hang on to it and hang on and hang on. I've decided to make a rule where if I don't watch it in 4 days I'll just send it back.
Posted by Ted | September 11, 2003 10:16 PM