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What happens when you realize you have a few extra hours and want to watch a movie? Here at Bentley University, we have many of the comforts of a small city; we have our own bookstore, post office, convenience store, library, police force, and even a few food establishments. However, those of us looking for a good movie to rent or purchase have only the library’s limited selection to choose from or must drive off-campus. But wait.now thanks to the Internet, rental movies are just a few clicks and a couple days away from your campus mailbox.
For the past couple of weeks, I have been testing out both Blockbuster Online and Netflix, two companies which offer DVDs by mail to customers nationwide. Both companies mail your DVDs through the US Postal Service and give you a prepaid, preaddressed envelope to return the DVD in, and both companies offer similar methods of adding DVDs to your “queue” through their website. Where they differ is in their efficiency and the perks to their service.
Blockbuster Online’s bonus lies in their network of physical stores in addition to their online movie by mail business. Depending on your plan, Blockbuster Online gives you between one and five coupons per month to use in one of their local Blockbuster stores, and they also offer a level of pricing with no in store exchanges, and a level with unlimited in store exchanges. This feature would be helpful if there were any Blockbuster Video stores on campus, which there are not, and the closest store to Bentley’s campus is about a mile away from campus, which isn’t far but if you don’t have a car on campus, the coupons are virtually worthless. Another feature which Blockbuster Online gives its members is the ability to share your queue with your Facebook friends as part of your news feed, hardly a feature which leaves a strong impression. Blockbuster also offers downloadable movies, but they charge an astronomical amount to download a movie; for the movie Love Guru it cost $19.99 to own it and $3.99 to “rent” it for 24 hours. Interestingly, Blockbuster still doesn’t recognize my Bentley address as a valid address and frequently asks if I want to change my address.
Netflix built its reputation on the Internet and has always been a movie by mail company and can’t match Blockbusters coupons for movie rentals at a physical store. What they do offer instead is a library of streaming movies and videos on demand from their website. They currently offer around 13,000 titles, more than double what they had a year ago, and have around 15,000 titles promised by the end of the year for instant viewing. I tried using the feature to watch episodes of the TV show Dexter and was quite impressed with the quality; the videos seemed to be near DVD quality and started almost instantaneously. You could also watch TV episodes of Heroes, CSI, and 30 Rock. As part of their movie collection, titles such as Superbad, Enchanted, and Spider Man 3 were all part of the Top 50 most popular instantaneous movies on Netflix. The only downside that I found to watching the movies online is that they only play in Internet Explorer. Otherwise, I found that Blockbuster and Netflix are pretty evenly matched on the features although Blockbusters site seemed less intuitive and more overwhelming with a lot more pictures and text on a page compared to Netflix’s website.
While Blockbuster’s plans are slightly more expensive and certainly more confusing than Netflix’s, they justify the pricing difference by the addition of in store rentals. I did find however that Blockbuster just couldn’t compare to Netflix on multiple levels. Where Blockbuster lost its tie was in its turnaround time. I ordered my Netflix DVDs and Blockbuster DVDs on the same day, Saturday, and had two popular titles on both of my queues: Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Iron Man. Both Blockbuster and Netflix listed the two DVDs as having a short wait. Monday afternoon, Netflix emailed me to inform me that all three of the DVDs I requested should arrive on Tuesday, but Blockbuster only told me my least popular DVD would arrive on Tuesday. Unfortunately, due to mail services, student mail takes an extra day, so I received the four DVDs on Wednesday. Forgetting Sarah Marshall arrived on Thursday, and Iron Man took an extra week and didn’t arrive until the following Tuesday.
Both Netflix and Blockbuster offer a phone number, and Blockbuster offers email service as well, but Netflix offers 24 hours a day, 7 days a week phone support, while Blockbuster only offers phone support Monday through Friday, 8:00am to 8:00pm. When I called Netflix, they had me waiting for a representative for less than a minute. However, when I called Blockbuster, I was on hold for more than six minutes to speak with a representative who couldn’t answer my question on how many movies Blockbuster Online offers. Fortunately, if a DVD gets lost in the mail, Netflix and Blockbuster both easily allow you to report a DVD missing and they ship you out a new one the next business day.
Both Netflix and Blockbuster offer promising options for any Bentley University student, provided that you don’t mind paying and waiting for it. I found that Netflix had a much better, more intuitive website, with a better value and wider selection of movies. Both Blockbuster and Netflix were very close to break even in my tests, but where Netflix really came ahead was in its shipping times. If you have a car on campus and don’t mind driving to Blockbuster when you want a last minute movie, Blockbuster is your best bet. Otherwise, Netflix is clearly the winner for any Bentley University student.
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