Just about anyone who has had more than one conversation with me in the past ten months knows that Golden and I are signed up for Blockbuster online. For the past couple of years I have thought that subscribing to an online service would be cool because I could catch up on the ton of movies that I have been meaning to see for a while. When Blockbuster and Netflix started competing on price last year and Blockbuster started issuing free rental coupons to online subscribers I knew that was my time to act. I truly believe we save money now on entertainment because we don't have to go out as much to be entertained.
For the longest time my greatest concern was that Netflix customers would see that Blockbuster offered an obviously better deal (three movies out at a time plus in store rentals) and move en masse to Blockbuster. To my knowledge, Blockbuster doesn't practice slamming, which is giving heavy users of the service lower priority for high demand movies, either. This would do in Netflix, I figured, and Blockbuster could either raise rates or get rid of online features. This is the only reason I initially waffled on whether to go with Blockbuster or with Netflix.
Based on news I am hearing, though, the opposite is really true. Netflix is turning profits with three to four times more customers than Blockbuster, and Blockbuster is hardly making any money on its online service. What I don't fully understand yet is why Netflix customers have remained loyal to Netflix. I know several people who use Netflix, and at least a few are very loyal customers.
I am realizing that Netflix users are kind of like Mac users. They signed up for the original service that came out, were generally happy with the experience, and now talking about a Netflix queue is kind of the same as talking about the songs on an iPod. I think because I jumped into the services a little late I chose more from a cost analysis perspective. My overall experience with Blockbuster online is very positive, though, so I hope it hangs around a while.
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I keep wondering how blockbuster's maintaining. Some day our kids will be telling their children, grandma and grandpa use to have to go to the store to get a thing called a disk and that was the only way you could see a movie after it left the theater! :) Of course by then everything will be digital and they will not get that concept at all! :):)
I meant to comment earlier today but blogger was down.
Dust, I am thankful for Golden that she has you to carefully consider all the pro's and con's to these major life decisions.
I don't know much about Mac users and how that analogy applies, but I do know that Netflix had quite a few years advantage over bb-online. BB-online is what...a year and a half - two years old. They are still working out all the kinks and building their collection.
But yes, I read that Netflix has 3 million members compared to BB-online's 1 million.
What I do know about the Netflix users is that they are the kind of people who are on the cutting edge of technology. Meaning that they jumped on a long time ago and have stayed faithful.
Those kinds of people also like their certain kind of films which the BB brick and mortar stores didn't offer. BB was commercial and Netflix had everything.
But lately I've been reading that people are becoming unhappy with Netflix - their movies are taking too long to arrive, etc.
I know BB-online is still messing with things to make it run more smoothly and I think they'll be around for the long haul.
There is not much of a decision for me. Whoever has the best deal gets my business and right now that happens to be BlockBuster.
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