A Better Way to Get Your DVD Fix

Readers' Comments

(August 23, 2002) It's Monday morning, and the tapes you rented Friday night at Blockbuster need to be returned. But you've got to drop the kids at school, you're running late for work, and there's no way you're going to fight the traffic around the Hommocks to get into the Blockbuster parking lot. You'll probably forget to go by after work, so you'll be slapped with late fees.

Surely there's another way!

All web-savvy movie buffs are waiting for the happy day when we'll be able to download any movie, any time, day or night, over the Web. That day may be years away, because broadband isn't quite broad enough to handle such huge files in a timely fashion. In the meantime, a new company called Netflix has come up with a pretty nifty solution.

For a flat monthly fee, Netflix lets you rent DVD movies by choosing from a huge and ever-growing collection of films, all available on their website. The really great thing is this: you can keep the movies for as long as you like. No late fees. Period.

So this is how it works: you login to the site (you can choose to set a cookie, so you won't have to login afresh each time), and you can browse from every genre imaginable, or pick from the most recent DVD releases, or search by title, actor, director, etc. You can have hundreds of movies in your "queue," essentially a wish-list of movies you want to see in the future. You can remove and rearrange the order of movies in your queue anytime you like. At the lowest membership level, $19.95/month, you can have three DVDs out at a time, four at a time for $24.95, five for $29.95. At the $40/month level, you can have eight out at a time. Three doesn't sound like enough movies for a whole month? Well, never fear. You can have many more than three. Here's how:

Netflix mails your DVD in a clever paper sleeve, which, with a small rip here and a fold there, becomes a return envelope. When you're through with the movie, you simply put it back in the sleeve and drop it in the mail. Once it's received back at Netflix (they have a warehouse in Queens now, so it doesn't take long), the next DVD in your queue is mailed out. That's the trick, see.

Although you may have signed up for only 3 movies out at a time, you can see as many in a month as you can watch and mail back. They keep coming as long as you keep sending them back, with no limit. This is just ideal if you're like my husband and me; we often rent a movie and just don't get around to watching it when we had planned. Back in our Blockbuster days, we'd often end up either keeping movies past the due date and having to pay late fees, or just returning them on time, unwatched. Now, with Netflix, we know we can watch them when it's convenient for us, not the video store.

 

Netflix Queue

Netflix uses your rental pattern to suggest other movies you might like, but this is done unobtrusively. Occasionally, a movie gets lost in the mail (or stolen; the Netflix mailing sleeve is pretty obvious), but all you do in that case is list the movie as lost, and Netflix sends you another copy. This has happened to us twice over the last couple of years, and so far, Netflix hasn't tried to charge us for the lost DVD. You can choose to buy a movie you've already rented, or outright.

Netflix is a perfect synthesis of Internet technology and real-world usefulness. Some very smart entrepreneur looked at a common problem (inconvenient movie rental programs) and saw a way to solve it, using the web. We were early adopters of Netflix, and we watched it cope with some growing pains. Now, the service works, for the most part, flawlessly, and our movie cravings mesh beautifully with our online orientation.

If you try Netflix, I'd love to hear what you think of it. Email me, and I'll include your thoughts in an update to this article.

Reader Comments:

My wife and I joined earlier this summer and we are hooked. We have destroyed our Blockbuster Video membership cards and have happily never gone back. I really think that Blockbuster missed the boat with this novel concept and it is only a matter of time before they feel the pinch of Larchmont residents leaving them. Who needs the late fees, videos you want never in stock and the bad parking? not us - We are Netflixers! -- Dave Hutton

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