Posted by wunnuy on 01/10/10 11:35

I am one of those long time Netflix people who was a victim of
throttling. I complained and got dicked around and finally, because
both my girlfriend and I have had it, decided to check out
Blockbuster's service to see how it compared to Netflix. Here is a
basic summary of what I found:

The Netflix disks generally have a two-to-four (sometimes more) day
turnover (although over the last few months it's been a week sometimes
before I get disks back, some disks never come but if you have Netflix
you know how it is).
Blockbuster anywhere from three days to never (more on that)

One day I put all three Netflix disks and all three Blockbuster disks
in the mail the same time. I recieved my next two Netflix disks TWO
days later and the third one four days later. Two of the blockbuster
disks came five days and the other a week.

The soonest turn over for Blockbuster disks was three days and it
happened once.

Netflix picks the disks off your queue in the order you put them.

Blockbuster seems to randomly pull disks off your queue without any
reasoning. I had ten disks in my queue, ALL available and it took the
tenth one, skipping the nine before it.

When sending a complaint to Netflix the response has generally come
within 5 to 7 days.
Blockbuster within 24 hours (along with a survey to rate your
complaint's response)

When adding a TV series to your queue, Netflix adds the whole season.
Blockbuster adds the first one, then asks if you want the rest of the
season (which can be good or bad depending on how you prefer to watch
them).

Both services sent TV shows out of order (getting disk 2 before disk 1
- at least with Blockbuster, it was Nightgallery so it didn't matter).
With Netflix, they said they sent both disks the same time, but one
came three days before the other and there's no way that's the mail's
fault.

To summarize, I thought Netflix had gotten bad. It used to be a GREAT
service and its answer to all the competition popping up was to get
worse. With that said, Blockbuster makes Netflix look like the greatest
service in the world. It's been a week now and I haven't received any
new disks from Blockbuster. I am not kidding. My "sent disks" is empty,
yet I've got all these available movies in my queue. I emailed them to
find out what was up. I have 8 movies in the queue and up until today,
they were all available. The response was that I needed to put more
movies in my queue, they recommend at least 30. I emailed back saying
what does it matter if the 8 I have are available. Now I see only two
are available, yet still nothing has been sent. In that time, I have
sent and received two sets of 3 Netflix disks. My trial month with
Blockbuster isn't even over but I'm canceling today. It is absolutely
the worst service you could imagine. I'm going to stick with the lesser
of two evils at the moment until a reliable service can be created
somewhere...

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