Netflix - Not bad! Qwikster - uh, never mind...

Haha, that was me like 5 years ago.

These here are uncharted waters I'm typing from...

Plus all the video stores in SF and the East Bay (yay Reel Video) are uniformly excellent.

I stopped Netflix after a year when I found myself without the time to watch films. I kind of exhausted the stuff I absolutely HAD to see that I couldn't find else where, and was renting stuff I just felt like I was supposed to see. Now I like going back into the video store and looking at boxes, I find more surprises that way. But I'll probably go back to Netflix at some point.

I've had a little lag with them lately; didn't receive a movie all last week. But that was unusual.

It's perfect for TV series: I'm not going to pay $100 for an Alias boxed set just to check out a show I'm curious about, and video stores in this area don't carry TV series except for the first couple months after a major one is released, but it's simple enough to pop it in the queue (rentals are done by disc, though, so five-disc boxed set = five rentals).

I'm not sure it's worth the price for folks who won't watch movies very often, unless they're already paying late fees because of renting stuff and letting it sit there, or if they go with the lowest plan; but I put movies in while I work, by default.

The only problem with it is that you only get the bonus disc in two-disc sets if you rent it separately -- and it doesn't usually seem worth the bother to do so, but it also means you're sometimes missing out on any special features that you might ordinarily at least browse through if you'd rented it locally and gotten the bonus disc as, you know, a bonus.

(Oh, another good thing: if something seems to have gotten lost in the mail, or is damaged and unwatchable, or etc., you just click on the button that says so and they give you the benefit of the doubt and ship out either a replacement or the next movie in your queue, whichever you tell them.)

And this has happened to me about twice in 18 months of fairly intense Netflixery. Can't recommend it more highly. It's a bit of a bummer about the bonus discs, but I've noticed that in cases where the movie proper covers two discs (Once Upon a Time in America, for example), they send out both discs simultaneously.

I just wish their collaborative filtering system would stop insisting I rent Norma Rae

I've had 'Andrei Rublev' for about 3 months now. I'll probably finish it sometime this year.

So that's why it's a "short wait" in my queue listing.

Gerry  

Cinemania

Hedwig and the Angry Inch

Fitzcarraldo

Pickup on South Street

Songs from the Second Floor

Beau Travail

The Magdalene Sisters
 
Wings of Desire

Rashomon

Shampoo

Strangers on a Train

Modern Times

M. Hulot's Holiday

The Man in the White Suit

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Experiment in Terror

The Lost Weekend

The Man With the Golden Arm

Imitation of Life: Double Feature

From Here to Eternity

The Young Ones: Disc 1
Triumph the Insult Comic Dog
Zoolander
The Sweet Hereafter
Irma Vep
Man Bites Dog
Jerry Maguire
Poison
Bob Dylan: Don't Look Back
Kurt & Courtney

what's experiment in terror?

Re: Le Video. Awesome store. I love it.

Re: alternatives ... search: greencine. Never used it but it's Netflix with an indie/foreign selection that looks impression. But with indie/foreign it will probably be hard to make it as financially worth your while as Netflix is.

experiment in terror is a blake edwards noir film that i recommended to @d@ml.

Nosferatu (Herzog)
Tokyo Story bonus disc
Rules Of the Game
Onibaba
The American Friend
The Count Of Monte Cristo
a Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes dvd
Bob le Flambeur

...

uh... okay! ?? !

Alias Season 1 Disc 5
Versus
Texas Chainsaw remake
Lost in Translation
Babylon 5 Season 3 Disc 3, 4, 5
The Last Unicorn
The Singing Detective remake
Belly

Two days for 2 out of 3 (and I assume the 3rd probably went out later in the day and will be here tomorrow or that it's a postal twitch) is pretty damn good for what I assume is a recently begun company (at least more recently than Netflix); I don't know if it's that I'm near their major distribution center, or if they have multiple ones a la Netflix.

seriously tempted by it as the rip off dvd rental place near me is 3 pounds a night!

http://www.moviesforme.ca/?REFERER=affiliate238
http://www.nrexpress.ca
www.dvdflix.ca

I'm assuming the selections aren't going to be as good, though

Two more movies arrived today, again with only a two-day delay. Their main base of operations is in Indiana, as it turns out, so that's helpful.

Orgazmo also arrived today, after, what, nine days -- it was shipped with the initial movies, and judging from the packaging it was mishandled somehow; it's re-stamped "correction," with a March 29th postmark on top of the March 23rd one.

... x7, right?

Yes!

And now for a trip down memory lane:

Wedbush Morgan’s Michael Pachter: Sell Netflix, Buy Blockbuster

this whole article is totally bonkers but i had to stop and just stare out the window for a little bit after getting to this paragraph https://t.co/p7T1EvXSqG pic.twitter.com/PoF261ckDX

— killsey sutton 🔪 (@kelseymsutton) October 25, 2018

it is deeply, deeply tempting to buy a shit-ton of Netfliz stock

I can't believe it won't go back up

― he carried yellow flowers (DJP), Tuesday, October 25, 2011 10:09 AM (3 months ago)

Netflix is up more than 40X this decade making it by far the best performing public stock of the decade.

In previous decades:
2000s - Medifast (~93X)
1990s - Dell (~92X)
1980s - Circuit City (~93X) pic.twitter.com/ra4RURCQHQ

— Tanay Jaipuria (@tanayj) December 23, 2019

What stock will do this in the 20s?

Juul

Would be a rollercoaster if DJP had bought in 2011. Down 25% after hours today, lowest since February 2018.

https://www.npr.org/2023/04/18/1170740799/netflix-ends-dvd-by-mail-service

I held onto the DVD service until last year. I'd told myself that it was the only way to watch some titles that weren't available on a streaming service, which was true. But I hadn't realized until a few years ago just how many movies can now be easily rented to stream via Amazon or Apple or whatever. Combine that with the selection of services like HBO and Criterion, and there's not much I feel like I'm missing out on without the DVD subscription.

Yeah pretty much a cornucopia out there at this point. Not truly universal, but increasingly the options whether via individual rentals or subscriptions are pretty remarkable.

you can find really weird stuff on Tubi too, I saw Antonioni's The Passenger on there last month

http://pbs.twimg.com/media/FdmVtbtWIAIgETu.jpg

Breaking my silence to say this sucks.

idk maybe it’s because my tastes are targeted toward obscure trash but the digital rental situation is still pretty dismal imo

I agree tbh, not that relying upon physical media was always so great but it's astonishing to me how much easier it was for me to track down (for example) Hong Kong films in the late VHS/early DVD era. Not that the physical media isn't still out there but it's much harder to track down something to buy, and impossible to rent.

20 plus years ago I found it remarkably easy to dig up some Billy Tang movies I wanted to see

though i haven't used the netflix dvd service since 2010 so i'm part of the problem, and my issues with digital rental are as tied up in the nature of region-oriented legal rights, artificial scarcity, blah blah blah as much as they are with streaming itself, though i think they're all interrelated systems that i am personally victimized by, keeping me from watching splatter: naked blood with ease or keeping any number of cheap '80s horror films that have been recently remastered by arrow/vinegar syndrome with a poorly-transferred DVD/VHS rip as their primary digital versions

xxp

I don't want to harangue companies for elevating obscure trash to a certain level of quality but there are a lot of films I used to see in the past for really cheap which are now released in these exorbitant special editions and honestly I just can't afford them

Yes, there's far more films on my watchlist that aren't streaming anywhere than are. Otoh there's always piracy - at the end of the day it's not like you're giving the artists much money anyway when you're streaming some 80's Hong Kong joint.

Maybe the cousin to the new vinyl reissue movement where dollar bin records are now repressed in these $36 editions and what it winds up doing is escalating the prices of those $1 records along with them

The boutique blu ray market is prob as great as it's ever been but yeah you gotta be a Soldier of Cinema, pre order because it's gonna sell out, deal with exorbitant prices.

I'd argue the upgrade in terms of quality from dollar bin DVD to blu is usually a lot more clear than a lot if those vinyl reissues. Also the extras clearly much better value than with vinyl where half of the time they don't even throw in some new liner notes.

Yeah I mean one can't really compare arrow/shout factory to plain recordings or whatever, the former really do the work. I guess the similarity is where media becomes a boutique market and less accessible financially.

it's kind of astonishing how long their DVD mailing service lasted, considering they de-branded it, didn't promote it and basically tried to suppress all knowledge of it

It must've been somewhat profitable for them to keep it going into the 2020's

Well, they killed off all their rental competition, aside from Redbox (which is long ke barely going rn, and only really had an edge on new releases anyway).

I still watch as many films on DVD as on streaming services. I am lucky to have a decent public library in my city, which is linked to a huge network of other libraries throughout the metro area. As long as one of the linked libraries has a title (and they rarely come up empty no matter how obscure my request is) I can have it delivered to my local within a few days.

It's sad because to me this was something the Internet _got right_

I still miss the days of being subscribed to the DVD service, I was still office-bound so I'd just take the envelope into the office and fly through dvds every week. granted, I'm sure based on the comments above that the inventory got massively shitty, but it was pretty good when this thread was new.

digital Netflix is a Cyclopean chasm of boredom rn.

everything's a damn Netflix original and it either stars Adam Sandler or some guy who played Cocaine Dealer #3 on C.H.I.P.S as the star

and right now there are a grand total of 36 films from before 1980 that are available to stream

jesus

At this moment, Netflix is streaming about 3800 films - less than half of what the average Blockbuster used to carry.

As for films made before 1990? Only 79 titles are currently streaming. If we go to 1980 or earlier, that drops to 36 (!)

✨PHYSICAL MEDIA STILL MATTERS✨

— Kate Hagen (@thathagengrrl) April 18, 2023

out of all streaming services, I think I use Netflix least of all, I keep it purely for my folks. right now most of their investment seems to be in standup

I am lucky to have a decent public library in my city, which is linked to a huge network of other libraries throughout the metro area. As long as one of the linked libraries has a title (and they rarely come up empty no matter how obscure my request is) I can have it delivered to my local within a few days.

― henry s

this is what i also do but there's lots of stuff nypl doesn't have and many of the dvd's are trashed and won't play through. anything the least bit kid-friendly is basically a shiny frisbee.

one single non-profit indie video store in Baltimore has 8x as many films as Netflix

Just last week I got two DVDs from Netflix because no county library branch or my uni library carried them. This sucks.

🏴‍☠️

I am really sorry to hear the announcement of the discontinuation of Netflix's DVD rental service. In the 9 years since I started subscribing I've rented and watched close to 2400 movies. Not only has it been great for accessing classic films, but the whole concept of the queue, which allows you to program a rotating list of multiple directors' films to watch in chronological order, has been really great. It has been an education

I like looking at the history of all of the films I have rented over the years, it's my version of the thread here where everyone posts the films they have recently seen to make a record. I still have close to 500 films in my queue, so I know I have to trim it down to some I really want to watch and some I know I'll never otherwise see after Sep 29th

Netflix DVD has been great for recording one's entire film viewing history, the whole thing is there. Letterboxd seems paltry in comparison. I guess I will have to privately note my own viewing experiences from now on. The Last (x) movies you saw (II) thread - what is that about? - are you all intending that as a place for you to look back on and remember and document your experiences, or is it just a vehicle for conversation? I have never really understood it

I've kept a list since 1992, which I migrated to Letterboxd 10 years ago. Sometimes I'd forget to log something, though, and Netflix rental history was a useful backup.

end of an era

Our last-ever day of shipping out the red envelopes is getting close. You have 40 more days to enjoy your DVD Netflix membership before we send out our final shipments on September 29th. Here are a few ways you can make the most of this final season:
Move must-watch titles to the top of your queue, to increase your chances of receiving them. We’ve also added a handy "move streamable titles to the bottom" option to help you make sure each red envelope counts! (Note that if your queue has no streamable titles, this option won’t be shown.)
Your data will be available until October 27th, so be sure to download a keepsake PDF of your queue, rental history, ratings, and reviews here. Plus, due to popular request, we’ve added the option to download in CSV format!
The last day to change your plan is August 28th. If you’d like to get more discs, browse our plans here.
As a reminder, September 29th is definitely our last day of shipping. Naturally, we hope everyone successfully receives their last shipments – however, in the event that a disc gets damaged or lost in the mail, we will unfortunately not be able to ship you a replacement after September 29th.
We truly appreciate you being part of our final season. Thank you for welcoming our iconic red envelopes into your homes for 25 years. Any further questions? See our FAQ.
—The Netflix DVD team

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/09/netflix-dvds-mail-ending/675204/

The real reason I stuck it out was the queue. Netflix allows DVD subscribers to save titles to a list of films, which are then sent in the order in which you added them. I’ve grown very attached to this system, and I’m not looking forward to its disappearance. At one point, I had more than 200 movies in my queue—years’ worth of viewing, especially after I switched from three discs at a time to one. Even as I started adding more streaming to my movie diet, I kept one strict rule: If there was a new DVD waiting for me from Netflix, I had to watch that first. Long day at work and not really in an Ingmar Bergman mood? Too bad, buddy. You-from-eight-months-ago thought you should watch The Silence, so that’s what you’re watching.

Got billed yesterday. The one nice part about losing the disc service is now I'm paying them like 55% less a month until I saw 'fuck it' and cancel.

The post office lost one of the discs I sent back on Tuesday, and Netflix has already disabled the customer service arm of DVD.com, so I'm being shorted a disc in my final delivery. All in all, a perfect way to close this thing out.

Great work everyone!

I don't know why they don't just let everyone keep their final selections, but I guess they don't technically own the discs? Like they're just licensing them from the distributors/studios or something.. so they'll all end up in a landfill I imagine

They are letting people keep their absolute final selections, I'm just getting jipped out of one because of the post office.

If you signed up for it, you could also get ten random discs to keep on top of that.

I don't think the word gets better to use if you spell it differently btw

We lost disc service for this?

https://netflixtoken.io/

Is this 2022?