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Blocksucker
R. Alex Whitlock
I've been with Blockbuster Online for less than an hour and they've already irked me.
I commented
the other day that Blockbuster seemed to have a better selection than Netflix. Well, it's easy to appear to have a better selection when you list a whole bunch of videos that you don't have. Roughly 25% of the stuff that I was interested in are "Coming Soon." Nowhere was this mentioned
prior to my signing up. Instead, it showed the item and had an "Add to Queue" button which kinda sort of gave me the impression that if I was a member, I could watch it. (If you try to put it in your queue, you're sent to sign-up/log-in screen, which you must do to find out that an item is not available now and will not be until... who knows? It doesn't say. These are not new releases that I'm looking at and it's not just lost DVDs (which I'd understand). Entire serials that non-members see doing a search are "coming soon".
Does anyone know if Netflix does this or, if they show something on their site can I be at least somewhat assured that I can actually order and watch it?
I guess I can't be too surprised. I probably should have known better than to trust a
dishonest company.
Observations
Might not be too late to try to cancel your membership...or maybe just go with them for a month and then switch to NetFlix.
I'm actually on a two-week trial, so theoretically I can get out of this without paying anything. I say "theoretically" because the cancel subscription part of their website doesn't seem to be working. I've cleared out my queue so that they don't send me anything and will call them later in the week if their cancel persists in not working.
Not surprising, really. I'd expect Blockbuster to pad their list of availables.
Netflix has been caught in some shenanigans too:
http://www.manuelsweb.com/n...
So you might be out of luck there.
Tefkam,
Fascinating. If accurate, then you can only rent 8 or so before they start losing money. That comes out as only a little less than what I will be renting, but shipment delays would not conform to my schedule very nicely, which means that I would have to alter my planned viewing habits somewhat.
But I'm really between a rock and a hard place since it's the only way I can get the selection that they have. I do have some options, though. It sounds like Netflix gets worse the further in to it you get, so maybe I'll just cancel my subscription every six months or so, spend three months renting or with Blockbuster, then go back.
Hmmm.
I'd probably prefer they just charge $2.50 per shipped DVD.
RAW,
No idea. I'm guessing you're probably right, but if they charged $2.50 per DVD, then they woudln't be competing with places like Hollywood Video and Blockbuster's brick-and-mortar stores which charge less.
What it boils down to both for Blockbuster online and Netflix is that they have to hide their terms somehow. The claim of "rent as much as you want" and "no late fee/monthly fee" are their starter, and after that "throttling" their customers is what they do - behind the scenes of course - in order to keep from being unprofitable.
I'd have no problem if they were up front about it, just as I'd have a lot less problem with Blockbuster had they been more up-front about what their inventory was like.
Netflix seems to be very upfront about what things aren't yet available (but can still be put in your queue). They don't always have everything you want physically available -- all copies may be currently out -- but I have a feeling that may apply only to obscure Indian movies where they'd have only one copy, and not to things that are actually popular.
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