netflix

Many Consumerist readers wrote to Disney about the missing captions in rental editions of the Pixar movie "Up," either because they were personally affected or they found the omission offensive. In their response, Disney at least acknowledges the unique issue and promises to make up for the mistake of consumers submit proof that they rented "Up."  More »

Who wants to spend $500 on a dress that you'll be too fat for the next time you use it? Enter Rent The Runway, the Netflix of online dress rental.  More »

Sarah has been trying to catch up on the Showtime series Dexter over Netflix, but she's been stuck in the middle since early September because Neftlix won't get the next disc to her.  More »

Hollywood studios are sick of you renting their DVDs and want you to start buying them again. The way to trick you into this, they figure, is to withhold the discs from rental companies for a month, forcing you to get all antsy and run out and buy them.  More »

Here's an idea: When your top rivals are renting dirt-cheap DVDs from ubiquitous kiosks, or streaming thousands of films as a free bonus to customers who rent mail-order rmovies, what do you do? If you're Blockbuster, you start a trial run of kiosks that will allow consumers to rent DRM-protected videos on SD cards, and play them back using a proprietary box that will do nothing else. Yeah, that'll show 'em.  More »

Walmart announced yesterday that it will be slashing prices to below wholesale on 10 of the most popular DVDs that will be released soon, says the LA Times. Target announced that it will be matching Walmart. Amazon has not yet responded.  More »

Netflix isn't dragging its feet as it sets up its on demand streaming service on the PlayStation 3. After announcing the feature last week, Netflix has started sending out discs that let PS3 owners with Netflix subscriptions partake in the streaming.  More »

Best Buy announced a "a Best Buy-branded offering, available starting early next year," that will stream "first-run DVDs" online directly to consumers, says the NYT Bits Blog.   More »

Sony is barging in on Microsoft's territory, having hammered out a deal to stream Netflix movies over the console just like the Xbox 360 for no additional charge beyond the Netflix membership.  More »

Hacking Netflix spotted some sweet savings on the inside of envelopes sent out by the movie rent-by-mail service: $50 off coupons that would bring the price of an Insignia Blu-ray player down to about $100 or $150. The coupon expires Saturday.  More »

You can start watching Wizard of Oz for free online via Netflix from 9am October 3rd to 9am October 4th. The promo is part of the 70th anniversary of Dorothy and the gang's epic adventure. Yay, free flying monkeys!  More »

Back in the day there used to be these things called VHS tapes. They used to cost a lot of money — so there were these places you could go to rent them. The last surviving relic of this bygone era, Blockbuster Video (also known as the company that was almost stupid enough to buy Circuit City), announced in a regulatory filing today that it plans to close over 800 stores by the end of next year. This is nearly twice the number they previously announced.  More »

If other companies were smart, and they mostly aren't, they would adopt Netflix's strategy of having periodic outages then apologizing and offering credits without their customers having to do anything. Whenever this happens (as it apparently did on August 30) we get a flood of delighted emails from their customers, many of whom didn't even notice the outage in the first place.  More »

I had always thought that mail-order video rental only came to be after the invention of DVDs because video tapes are too bulky and delicate to send through the mail on a regular basis. I was wrong.  More »

Netflix customer service says that search results are unaffected by sponsorships. Still, that doesn't explain what happened when Melissa Leff tried to add some movies to her Netflix queue: nearly every search she tried brought up the Andy Richter star vehicle Aliens in the Attic.  More »

If you've found Netflix's pricing pyramid a bit tough to unravel, you're not alone. The cost of renting 3 DVDs is $17/month, whereas 6 DVDs is $36 (16.99 and 35.99, to be precise, but we don't count pennies here). Similarly, 4 DVDs is $24/month, 8 is $48. By traditional economies of scale, this may not make much sense: Getting 6 DVDs costs MORE than getting two 3 DVD subscriptions. And getting 8 DVDs isn't any cheaper than getting two 4 DVD plans.  More »

HackingNetflix was invited to tour a Netflix shipping center where 50 employees process as many as 90,000 discs a day. Pretty cool.  More »

Do you rent Blu-ray discs from Netflix? Have you had any show up with a crack on the outer edge that makes the disc unplayable? Victor just wrote to us that he's received several Blu-ray discs lately that are damaged, and he's wondering if it's just him or part of a wider problem.  More »

Robert's recent experience with his local Blockbuster just underscores how ill-equipped the rental chain is to compete against Netflix and new-star-on-the-block Redbox. Whether Robert has caught them deliberately throttling his account, or he's just the victim of a poorly implemented system, it's not the kind of customer experience you should have to settle for anymore.  More »

Puerto Rico and other U.S. Territories are in sort of an awkward place. Are they part of America, or not? Sure, they can't vote in presidential elections, but they are on the back of a quarter. This confusion has led to problems for Netflix users in Puerto Rico. Netflix will provide them with DVDs-by-mail service at the same price as service in the 48 contiguous United States, but considerably slower. However, they won't let Puerto Rico customers stream movies over the Internet, which would be handy while they wait three or four days for their DVDs to show up.  More »