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I am halfway through the 30-day free trial of BlockBuster Total Access, and by now I am quite ready to cancel out of Netflix, even with forthcoming Internet streaming feature. There’s a BlockBuster participating in Total Access plan right across from Facebook worldwide corporate headquarters, and living within a walking distance contributes to the bias towards Blockbuster. Your mileage may vary.

Every movie I get via mail I return to local Blockbuster and get a free in-store rental, which usually allows me to get the newest releases right away. Moreover, the return gets recorded in Blobkbuster database, the next movie is queued for being sent out the next morning, and effectively I am getting double the rentals I was getting with Netflix.

This is especially relevant for the weekend, as USPS doesn’t deliver on Sundays, so frequently sending out Netflix envelopes on Friday or Saturday would not get your replacement DVDs in till Monday-Tuesday. With Blockbuster I just bring Friday/Saturday mailings to the local store.

A coupon for a free rental or game doesn’t hurt either. Granted, it’s once a month thing, but it allows me to test drive a Wii game before committing to buying one.

Previously it seemed that Blockbuster selection was not as wide as Netflix’s one, so if one’s after the long tail of movies, Netflix was a definite choice. Now I browse through the New Releases pages of both sites, and have not noticed any significant differences between two online stores. Basically, there’re just so many suppliers in the wholesale DVD world, and looks like both Netflix and Blockbuster cover the same selection. Neither one, as far as I know, has any exclusive deals, so in the long run both will have to strive to avoid commoditization.

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch writes about finally canceling his 5-year-old Netflix subscription and switching to Blockbuster Total Access. His complains mainly involve Inability to get new releases quickly. Netflix deliberately buys a low supply of new releases, since the price points for new DVDs differ at the day of their release and two weeks later. After the initial two weeks passed, the fans of the movie have all bought in, responding to ads and other marketing hype, driving them to “own it today”. The price points change by roughly 25-30% and stay at that level till a 12-month drop, when the movie usually ends up in a bargain bin.

Meanwhile, Blockbuster provides the same plans, with a few twists that position it radically better than current Netflix offering.

1. You can return movies in store. And therefore have the clerks record the fact in Blockbuster database, meaning that a new movie is on its way the same or next day.
2. You can exchange movies in store. If you bring in a return from Blockbuster Online, you can also choose to exchange it for an in-store rental. Subject to the same rules as regular in-store rentals, this provides immediate gratification, especially in the case of a new release.
3. You get a coupon valid for a free in-store rental of a movie or a game. This is not related to the above offering, just a little freebie they provide with subscription to Total Access.

So what are the issues with Blockbuster? By now seems good to be true, right?

1. Blockbuster’s selection of foreign or specialty DVDs is occasionally worse. - Might matter a lot or might not matter at all. Mostly it concerns hard-to-find foreign titles, such as Russian The New Adventures of the Elusive Avengers is available on Netflix, but not at Blockbuster.
2. Majority of Blockbuster DVDs are widescreen, which is great, if you’re an owner of a widescreen HDTV, and which means losing 30% of screen real estate to nice black stripes, if you own a full-screen HDTV.

That’s it. If you’re not too much into foreign or weird movies that are hard to find, and own a widescreen TV, Blockbuster Total Access has exactly 0 disadvantages.

Peerflix, a user-to-user DVD trading service, reports on its numbers and relative success to Mercury News’ Silicon Beat blog. The company says it has about 150,000 registered users and 250,000 DVDs in the system. Still a far cry from what Netflix had even a year ago, but nevertheless a success for company that relies on user participation to generate its revenues.

Looks like Blockbuster has had it with price competition with Netflix and is now raising the prices to match Netflix. Customers who signed up for $15 a month plan, will get to keep it till the end of January, but all the new sign-ups will be given the $18 a month price stickers for 3-at-a-time plan, which was precisely what netflix charged.

The company said it has signed up 1 million members since its launch last August and hopes to double this number by March 2006. Blockbuster has 30 distribution centers and more than 200 stores that fill online orders.

I have just cancelled my account with them after giving a try to a two-month trial at Blockbuster. If I were to decide at this point, for the same amount of money I’d go with Netflix. Better movie selection and better turnaround time even with throttling make NFLX a winner here. The end of August is going to be dedicated to moving to another state, so for now I will hold off any sign-ups, but will probably renew Netflix when the summer ends.

Another gripe about Blockbuster is their focus on widescreen editions of the movies. They are cheaper to make, since there’s no modification needed to fit the screen, and I guess it works great if you have a widescreen TV. For those of us stuck with fullscreen models Blockbuster’s selection of fullscreen titles is rather poor. That is also reflected in their in-store shelves, by the way.

When Netflix CEO says Amazon will lose because of infrastructure (or, rather, lack of it), he might just have nailed it. I cancelled Netflix more than two weeks ago and joined Blockbuster’s Switch program that offers two free months of service, a gift DVD and two movie/DVD rentals per month from their offline locations.

The selection is not too bad, either, some foreign movies that were not available, or were “Extremely Long Wait” at Netflix, are available for immediate rent at Blockbuster.

However, the speed just kills the positive impressions from the service. Netflix had a service center in Spokane, Washington, Blockbuster stuff gets sent to Portland, Oregon, which is quite away, which increases the time it takes good ole USPS to deliver. As far as delivery, here’s what I had with Netflix:

• Ideal - I put the movie in the mailbox Tuesday morning, it gets delivered to Netflix on Wednesday, the same day they ship another one out and I get a new one on Thursday
• Realistic - I put the movie in on Tuesday, Netflix gets it on Wednesday, spends the rest of the day doing something rather, then sends me the movie on Thursday, so I get it on Friday.
• Throttling - I return the movie on Tuesday, Netflix stays quiet on Wednesday, then it records the movie received on Thursday, and sends me my stuff on Friday. Sometimes they say they send it on Friday, but really send it on Saturday, so I get the movie Saturday/Monday’ish.

Wow, you say, throttling really sucks, man, since it limits you to 3 movies a week, if you’re on the most popular plan. However, right now 3 movies a week is what I get from Blockbuster on a regular plan, with throttling taking place naturally, I suppose, due to their location in Portland, OR.

I will stick with Blockbuster for 2 months that I have available, but in first week of August I just might join Netflix again, unless something changes with Blockbuster rentals (I dare not ask for Spokane, WA center, but Seattle, WA would seem appropriate, seeing how Netflix has two - in Tacoma, WA and Spokane, WA).

I cancelled my Netflix account this weekend. Will give Blockbuster a try, since the Switch deal they are currently running includes:

• two free months of Blockbuster online
• two rental ticket for any movie or game at Blockbuster offline (pick the closest to you)
• a gift DVD, which you keep whether you stay with the service or not

And since Netflix doesn’t charge cancellation or account renewal fees (you lose the 2-week free trial though, which they give new customers, but it’s only fair), and neither does Blockbuster, a switch to Netflix will be easy once the two month free trial is over.

The catch? The switched customers get charged the Netflix price ($17.99 a month), not the Blockbuster regular regular price of $14.99 monthly. I guess those 3 extra dollars spread over 10 months would give them extra $30 and justify the 2-month-free deal.

If you’ve never been a subscriber to Netflix or Blockbuster, by the way, consider joining Netflix for free, spending two weeks with them and then doing the Blockbuster switch, to get a total of 2 and a half months free.

US retail giant WalMart is turning its DVD rental business to Netflix. No word on how much money the deal is worth but Netflix will feature promotional WalMart links for the 100K customers it gets from the retail chain.

Promotional this and “for the limited time” that. How much are your actual bills?

• Netflix $15.99 a month plan for 3 movies costs me $19.52 with all the taxes and fees factored in.
• Vonage $14.99 a month for 500 long-distance minutes costs me $16.94 with taxes and all.

What started out as a pretty good unlimited movie rental service is turning into a cause of frustration. It seems that a bunch of people call this a conspiracy theory, but nevertheless Netflix throttle did swing into full effect on my account. With the new Netflix center opening up in Spokane (they’re in 99224 by the airport, I am in 99037 in the Valley), I expected the wait times to be shorter, and indeed, that’s how Netflix justified their new center.

Generally a bunch of movies (usually 2) arrives each Monday, with another one on Tuesday, so if I find enough time to watch both movies Monday evening, they’re back in the mail by Tuesday morning and by Wednesday are at Netflix, which would ship me two more titles off the queue, which would arrive on Thursday. Theoretically with this set-up one should be able to get roughly 5-6 movies a week without additional hassles, especially if the Netflix distribution center is within half an hour drive.

But as soon as I started sending my movies back to Netflix right away, the process was interrupted by a whole bunch of hiccups. Sometimes they would lose a movie for 7 calendar days, recovering it all of a sudden after I reported it lost in the mail. Sometimes I would get a confirmation of the received movie, and then my next one would ship the next day. Netflix explains that such problems might be caused when the movie is not available at the distribution center, so they have to order it from somewhere else (probably Seattle in my case), which I find reasonable, but not for several weeks in a row consistently, with the titles varying from new releases to some pretty popular 4-5-year old movies.

Netflix doesn’t like you if you’re trying to rent more than 3 movies a week. They might oblige you with a 4th one coming during the given week on a 3-disc-at-a-time plan, but as soon as you prove to be a fast movie watcher, you’re on their blacklist for constant shipping problems, “Shipping Tomorrow” messages, and the discs being reported as not received.

Throttling is when netflix delays shipping videos to you because you are a heavy user. They do this to prevent shipping you too many titles each month, wihch costs them money in mailing fees. This angers loyal and long time customers who signed up for the service because it is heavily advertised as “unlimited.”

Here’s Reed Hastings in an interview with Business 2.0 talking about Blockbuster, Amazon and Wal-Mart entering the DVD-by-mail rental business:

“You’ve got the biggest rental company, the biggest e-commerce company, and the biggest company, period,” Hastings observes. “So if it’s true that you should be judged by the quality of your competitors, we must be doing pretty well.”

The same article has info on online DVD rental market: Netflix boasts 2.6 mln users, Blockbuster has estimated half a million, Wal-Mart has 50,000 users.