Posted by TH on 01/05/07 17:29

Well, I finished a trial month of Blockbuster service. Here are my
comparisons between Netflix:

BB has greatly improved since I tried them a year ago. Last year I had
about 13-14 movies a time in my queue and there would be long periods
where NO movie would be sent, despite the fact every movie was
"available now." There was one entire week where nothing was sent at
one point and various times when only one would be sent and two open
slots would just be sitting there. When I canceled and told the guy
why, he said "you have to have 30 movies in your queue" to which I said
"what does it matter if I have 30 or 3, if it says 'available now' then
they should be sent" to which he had no choice but to agree.

This time I had around 10-13 movies in my queue and there was no "must
have 30 rule" applied. Generally when one would arrive, another would
be sent by the end of the day.

The issues were:

* They would still take movies out of order. A couple times I had a
movie that was number 3 or 4 sent despite the fact all the movies above
it were "available now."
* I live in Los Angeles so I'm sure the distribution center is close,
movies should be arriving the next day after being sent, but this only
happened a couple times. Generally movies took 2, sometimes even 3 days
to arrive. I can't believe they're throttling new customers, I think
it's just shabby service.
* Netflix's biggest advantage over BB is selection. There were still
new releases and foriegn films that BB didn't get that Netflix does.
* The one HUGE advantate BB has over Netflix is on TV series disks:
They will send you TWO SIDED disks. Netflix breaks up everything into
one sided disks so you have to rent all of them as one disk. I rented
Miami Vice season 1 disks from BB and got the two sided disks, which
was great. I rented Miami Vice season 2 from Netflix and got one sided
disks meaning I had to rent twice as many from them to get the same
amount.

Of course with Netflix, you get throttled if you have a high turnover
so it's a lose-lose situation with them. I still hope a third large
company will get going at some points whose slogan will be "We will not
throttle" which would bring them lots of business.

Because of Netflix's throttling, I will just be renting from the local
mom & pop video store for the time being. When Netflix delivers disks
on time, they are better than BB, but otherwise, you're might be better
off with BB (you get the instore rental coupon too, as well as other
store offers) if you're a regular renter and if you watch a lot of old
TV shows.

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