How many movie rentals do you make a year?
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This was something I was wondering this evening as I opened up my latest delivery from Netflix and I thought it would be interesting to find out.
I was burnt badly by a late fee from BlockBuster a few years ago for a whopping $180, this was for a movie that was 3 weeks late, the first week cost $3.99, but after the first week they started charging something crazy like $4.99 a day, and then at the end of week three they considered the movie stolen and charged some more crazy money (when you travel a lot, sometimes you just forget to take that movie back before you catch the plane, and then you're gone for weeks and BlockBuster makes bigger profits). This lead me to pledge never to use Blockbuster again and to look for alternatives, which is when I found Netflix. It seemed perfect, no late fees, and I could find obscure movie titles in a searchable web interface, perfect. So in June 2000 I signed up, and since then I have received a steady stream of movies.
One of the many nice things about Netflix is that it keeps a record of every movie you watch and when you returned it, it also has available your entire billing history, which is why I could work out the following. So how many movies have I rented and what did it cost me? Well in the time since I joined Netflix, and I am in a 4 in your home grandfathered plan, I have rented 482 movies for a total bill of $1,850, which comes out to $3.84 a movie. Some of those movies I've had sit on a shelf for months with no penalty, before I have had the time to watch them. If I had kept the same habits with BlockBuster, I'd probably be looking at something like an average of $10 a movie. These movie rentals also include the Netflix instant watch movies, which have primarily been shows like Heroes which I did not see on TV, and a few movies that were projected on to the big screen during late night preparations with my fellow Collaboration University presenters.
I took the rental data from Netflix and dumped it into Approach to create these pretty charts...
This was something I was wondering this evening as I opened up my latest delivery from Netflix and I thought it would be interesting to find out.
I was burnt badly by a late fee from BlockBuster a few years ago for a whopping $180, this was for a movie that was 3 weeks late, the first week cost $3.99, but after the first week they started charging something crazy like $4.99 a day, and then at the end of week three they considered the movie stolen and charged some more crazy money (when you travel a lot, sometimes you just forget to take that movie back before you catch the plane, and then you're gone for weeks and BlockBuster makes bigger profits). This lead me to pledge never to use Blockbuster again and to look for alternatives, which is when I found Netflix. It seemed perfect, no late fees, and I could find obscure movie titles in a searchable web interface, perfect. So in June 2000 I signed up, and since then I have received a steady stream of movies.
One of the many nice things about Netflix is that it keeps a record of every movie you watch and when you returned it, it also has available your entire billing history, which is why I could work out the following. So how many movies have I rented and what did it cost me? Well in the time since I joined Netflix, and I am in a 4 in your home grandfathered plan, I have rented 482 movies for a total bill of $1,850, which comes out to $3.84 a movie. Some of those movies I've had sit on a shelf for months with no penalty, before I have had the time to watch them. If I had kept the same habits with BlockBuster, I'd probably be looking at something like an average of $10 a movie. These movie rentals also include the Netflix instant watch movies, which have primarily been shows like Heroes which I did not see on TV, and a few movies that were projected on to the big screen during late night preparations with my fellow Collaboration University presenters.
I took the rental data from Netflix and dumped it into Approach to create these pretty charts...
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Comments
I expect "electronic distribution" will be the next major transformation in movie rentals.
Have you looked at the various "download services" and if so, what is your take ?
Posted by Glen At 07:55:23 AM On 04/08/2008 | - Website - |
The instant movie on netflix is good, works fine on the PC, but requires IE and it's not Hi Def.
Amazon Unbox is nice in that it's integrated with Tivo but it's not HiDef so for real Hidef I still order the BluRay disks
Posted by Carl Tyler At 03:38:25 PM On 04/08/2008 | - Website - |
Same issue, late fees make me crazy. Just did the quick math and we've rented seven movies a month, at $17.99/month, so that's about $2.60 per movie. I actually rip the ones we really like so we can watch them any time without re-ordering. (Anyone want Ferris Beuller or Dogma? ;-> )
Posted by Arthur Fontaine At 09:04:27 PM On 04/08/2008 | - Website - |