For Thursday, February 7, 2002 Drummer Column, Gibbs, 755 words



DVDs to the knees -- Joining NETFLIX (My first ever blog)


I recently joined Netflix and I’m gassed up. It is awesomely splendid and fine and I like it.
Netflix in an online DVD rental service with a simple business model: All the DVDs you want for $20 a month, three at a time, no late charges. As fast as you can return them, postage-paid, they send you new ones, and the company is in San Jose so the turn-around is fast.
It began with my son-in-law, Chad, the sausage eater. He is the only other family member who is even more obsessive than I am. He joined Netflix two months ago and would not stop telling me how great it was. He’d send me emails, tell me on the phone, and recently on a visit to his house, he showed me the tiny pre-stamped return envelopes and pantomimed how easy it was to “flick” it into the nearest mailbox.
Finally, two weeks ago, after getting another email with a www.netflix.com link attached to it – this time from my daughter, who agrees with Chad – I clicked over and poked around the site. They have over 10,000 movies to choose from. I tried to trick them by searching for rare and unusual film titles, but they had them. They had everything I looked for, movies I haven’t seen hide nor hair of in decades. Under Foreign Films they list 19 countries. The banner across the top says “Two week free trial” so I gave it a whirl.
The application form did ask for a credit card number during the free trial as insurance. If I don’t cancel or return all DVDs by the end of the free trial, they promised to bill me. That seemed fair enough.
Three days later, on a Friday, the first three disks of The Sopranos 2nd Season arrived. I did an all-night marathon and watched 10 episodes. The last one ended at 5 a.m. Before bed, I eagerly drove down to the post office at the crack of dawn Saturday to return my DVDs so I could get more.
By Thursday, the fourth and final Sopranos 2nd Season DVD arrived, along with Mrs. Brown and a teacher documentary called First Year. I watched the Sopranos that night and returned it at 6:30 a.m. on my way to work Friday. We watched the other two over the Superbowl Holiday Weekend of American Pride and Football, along with football. This Monday the movie Vertical Limit arrived. In the mail toward me is a French film I can’t pronounce and Before Night Falls.
This will make seven DVD movies I’ll have seen in less than two weeks. If I keep at this pace, I could watch 15 DVDs a month, making the cost about 75-cents per movie. If I only watch 10, it’s a dollar a movie, and so on.
I don’t know if I will continue to rent at this pace. However, having only two weeks to trial the service before being charged, I wanted to literally “push the envelope” and measure the speed of their service. I am completely satisfied.
Once I devour a few dozen movies that have been on my want-to-see list for years, I’m sure I will slow down a bit. At that time I will really appreciate the no-late-fee policy. I’m allowed to keep my three allotted DVDs as long as I like. If something disrupts my plans to see a movie, I can simply wait a day. I will never again have to return a movie that I did not watch simply because my time ran out.
What else I like is the Rental Queue. I can pre-select as many movies as I want. I can schedule my viewing decisions months in advance. I currently have 25 movies lined up. I’ve set up thematic trilogies, like strings of comedies, French films, old classics, documentaries. I can even reserve movies that have not yet been released. When they are, I’ll get one.
I am free to take more cinematic chances. If I got a stinker before from the store, I lost four bucks. Now, I can just stop watching the bombs and send them back. I can experiment with that long list of borderline movies that I was never sure I would like.
Netflix has 500,000 customers. The owner started the company several years ago after paying a $40 late fee on Apollo 13, which he’d forgotten he had. He vowed, “Never again.” His company is now up there with Amazon as a major cash-moving Internet business.