I’m on the cheapest plan ($5/month, 1 disk at a time). There’s no way renting at Blockbuster could match that. And I’d have to have a list to lose, deal with people, and get it back on time. When I’m too busy I just hold on to the disk.
Netflix is totally worth it to me.
If I was single, I would see the value of Netflix and would, in all likelihood, be a faithful subscriber.
But being married, I want to spend all my free time at home with my wife (we both work a lot, so our shared time is limited). That means I’m not going to spend time at home watching movies she has no interest in (which probably represents 80% of the films I’d be likely to rent). We maybe rent one film a month–usually something she in particular wants to see, and very rarely something that’s hard to find.
So although I’ve dabbled with looking into getting a membership, I’ve never bitten because I know it’d largely be a waste of money in my circumstances.
[QUOTE=Darth Vader’s Little Pal
Even though I have a bad habit of holding onto movies for months at a time, I would bet I still save money with Netflix because I feel less of a desire to buy DVDs. If all I want to do is see that one scene with that guy about the thing, I can just pop it into my queue, get it in a few days, throw it back in the mail when I’m done and that’s one less thing cluttering up my tiny apartment.[/QUOTE]
That’s another good reason. I bought (or rather got for Christmas) a few seasons of old TV shows. I watched them once, and now they sit in a closet. Subsequent seasons I got from Netflix. If I have a great urge to watch them again, I can either put them back on my queue or by them. That saves a couple of months payments right there.
We have 4 at time. It works out well as I usually pick a movie for me, 1 for my husband (but usually 2 for me because he’s rarely in a movie watching mood) and then 1 for each of the kids. We watch them all over the course of a week and send them back and get 4 more for the next week. It turns out to be a lot cheaper than Blockbuster. It also works to our advantage when one of the kids gets hung up on a particular movie and wants to keep it longer than a week.
The only disadvantage is that sometimes we get busy and go 3-4 weeks without watching movies, at which point I’m paying a monthly fee just to add 4 extra movies to my DVD shelf for a few weeks, but when we do hold up our end of the deal it’s a great and cost-effective system. We do scale back on the rental plan in the fall when the new TV season starts up again. I rarely have time for movies other than at night and if I have to pick Netflix movies or new episodes of, say, Project Runway, PR is gonna win every time.
I owned a video store for 7 years and I absolutely adore Netflix. The selection is amazing, having a queque to add obscure stuff to when reading Dope threads, etc. And I’ve got two boys three years old and younger. I wouldn’t bother to go to a rental store with them in tow. It is fantastic!
-rainy