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The New York Times profiles Netflix, a company that pioneered subscription-based DVD plans where a disc is sent via postal service and no late fee is charged. It describes the company from May 1998, when it originally launched the Web site as a DVD-by-mail rental service (with late fees). Interesting factoids: Netflix operates 30 centers around the country and 11% of San Francisco residents subscribe to the service. Turns out, the company is not really afraid of Blockbuster, Wal-mart and Amazon moving into their markets, but they do consider on-demand Internet-download services to be a threat to their business model.

Netflix has been behaving strangely lately. The movies that I sent out Friday, Saturday and Monday morning (all before post office pick-up time) have all arrived there on Tuesday, but the new movies did not go out till today, and even as of Wednesday one movie is scheduled to be sent out on Thursday, which is unusual for them. Before they sent out new titles the same day the old ones were received. Under a current schema it’s hard to watch more than 3 movies a week, which undermines the concept of unlimited DVDs. Maybe just related to Spokane location being new and all.

For some reason Netflix makes it tough to get to this page, which lists all the new releases for the week. Not the usual 4-5 movies you’d get on Netflix’s front page (which are usually the ones with the largest budget) but all of them, including foreign movies, documentaries, etc. For this week they have added a whole bunch of Extreme Engineering documentaries produced by the Discovery Channel. From visiting the page for Extreme Engineering on Discovery.com it’s apparent that the shows generally focus on engineering marvels, like subways in the US, Panama Canal and Boston’s Big Dig. Added a couple of shows to the queue.

Fool.com story tells how to get online DVD rental from Blockbuster at $16 a month. Basically, sign up for their trial service, then tell them you want to cancel, mention the price being the problem and then see the offer price drop to $15.99 a month for 6 months. Moreover, if you’re a registered member of FatWallet CashBack program (and the registration, like all good things in life, is free), you will get $6 on your account in 90 days after sign-up.

Blockbuster Online DVD rental costs $17.49 a month, you can check out up to 3 movies at any time, and shipping both ways is free. Also, they will complement the online subscription with 2 free rental tickets a month. Why they wouldn’t allow the DVDs to be dropped at offline locations beats me, but I guess with the prepaid envelopes it’s easier to drive to the nearest Post Office box than to the nearest Blockbuster. The Fool.com guys are claiming that the price drop is not worth it when comparing the features of the service:

Whether Blockbuster’s latest attempt at gaining market share will work remains to be seen. It sure won’t be easy — Netflix was able to comfortably grow its subscribers despite a lower-priced Wal-Mart option for more than a year. When the price difference is small, small differences in service start to matter. Although I’ll stay with Blockbuster for that one more month of free service — come on, it’s free — I’ll switch back to Netflix and its $17.99 equivalent plan once the promotional offer expires. Simply put, I think the additional features are worth the extra $0.50.