Atlanta Macintosh Users Group

I've been a Netflix customer for about a year now, and for a long while I was very satisfied with them. They had a very quick turn-around time: for example, when I returned a movie on Monday, they would log it in as received on Tuesday and on Wednesday or Thursday I would have a new DVD in hand. I upgraded my membership back in November so that I can have up to 3 DVDs at a time with "unlimited" rentals per month.

A month or two ago, I noticed it was taking longer and longer for Netflix to receive movies I returned and ship out new ones. Turnaround time had increased from 3 or 4 days to more than a week. I thought maybe they were just understaffed or something, but now I know the truth:

If Netflix thinks you're returning movies too fast or renting too many titles per month (despite the "unlimited" rental plans) they will "THROTTLE" your account and deliberately delay logging in movies you return and shipping out new movies to you. They also apparently skip the movies at the top of your queue and send you titles farther down the line.

Here's one news article on the story: link (http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/local/states/california/northern_california/13841259.htm) . If you do a Google News search you find others, but most are variations of the same AP article.

I can somewhat understand why they're doing it (doesn't mean I agree or think its right though).

But they're not alone. Blockbuster does it too...
http://www.fool.com/News/mft/2006/mft06021501.htm

 :(

I always thought besides not being able to get exactly what you wanted only a movie on your list, that when you figure out the travel time of the movies you are way ahead going to Blockbuster.  Get one of their unlimited plans.

If you really don't want to go out to get the movie you can try www.dvdovernight.com.  I used them for a long time.  You rent a movie for $3-4 and you get it for a week.  When you are finished you drop it in the mailer and send it back.  No waiting for other movies. You can rent up to five at a time.  The problem is they seem to go thru times when they have very little selection of new movies.  Not unusual to only have 5-10 available out of their top 50.

I hadn't heard of www.dvdovernight.com. Sounds like they're similar to NetFlicks and BlockBuster's mail-delivery movie service (which is what I was referring to in my last post). I'll look at their variety, could be a viable alternative.

The biggest difference is you only pay fo rthe movies you rent.  You get them for a week after you receive them. You can rent up to five per order.  If you really want to go crazy you can rent five more the next day.  No limit that I know of as to how many you can have out.

This looks like it'll be just right for me. We don't rent a lot of movies, so NetFlix never really appealed to us (wouldn't get our money out of it). But this looks pretty good. Recent releases are $4, older titles are $2, and some look to be priced at $3.

I'm deffinitely going to give this a try. Thanks for the tip Royce!

I have used both of these, and am very happy with the blockbuster version of dvd by mail!