Netflix – the beginning

I signed up for Netflix.

After reading a whole stack of reviews, I felt I understood most people’s complaints with them, and what most people liked about them. I also read carefully through everything I could find on the actual site, the requirements, everything. New distribution centers, including one in Phoenix, should address most people’s main complaint; slow shipping, back when they only had one distribution center. Other complaints included not being able to get the movies at the top of their queue, especially when they were new releases, plus … how much trouble it is to add movies to your queue all the time; some people kept getting to the end of their queue without realizing it, and then going days or weeks without getting movies.

Which won’t happen to me.

The site suggests that the “average” person adds 6 to 10 movies to their queue on their first visit, and encourages me to add movies to my queue. Except that before I ever got to the actual “queue” screen where it suggests that, I’d added the maximum number of movies to my queue – 500. I didn’t have any trouble browsing, or finding movies I’d like to see and adding them to my queue. I doubt I’ll ever have trouble.

There were a couple of movies I’d have liked to add that they don’t seem to have in their library, but here’s my idea: I’ll rent every movie that Netflix offers that I want to see, and when I’ve exhausted their library, I’ll cancel Netflix and switch over to Greencine, which is a service with the same features and price structure as Netflix, but which focuses on independant and foreign DVDs.

Anyway, to observe the progress of their shipping times, I’ve added the “netflix” category to FYTH, and will post all netflix activity here. ie: when they say it ships, when I actually receive it, when I ship it back, when they say they receive it, and when they ship the next one and so on, including broken, scratched, and other problem DVDs and how they react. I’m also going to do a count of the DVDs and see exactly how fast I can get and watch 500 DVDs from Netflix. After 500 DVDs, I’ll not only be able to give a fair review of their service and customer service, but I’ll actually have quite a bit of data on their shipping times as well. There will, undoubtedly, be graphs.

So, look forward to that.

Anyway, here are the first three DVDs, they said were shipped today (3/08/04) and I should expect them on or around Thursday (3/11/04):

1. Jim Henson’s The Storyteller
2. Lost in La Mancha
3. Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life: Special Edition