Online Rental Blog

Movie rental death match: Blockbuster Online vs. Netflix

Posted on February 26th, 2008 by freedvdtrials.com

I’m a huge fan of online movie rentals. It wasn’t many years ago that finding a good selection of DVD’s at a rental store was difficult. Once they were commonly available at stores, they were commonly unavailable by demand. Netflix enters the scene with their online rental service. Never go to the video store again, never wait in the weekend lines, get your movies fast. Of course, I wasn’t ready to give up that local access to movies, so I didn’t venture into a subscription until Blockbuster Online was released.

There are obviously many similarities between the two services, and I suspect that the determination of which service is better for you will boil down to a few simple tradeoffs, or you’ll be attracted to one of the few differentiators between the two services.

Quick Overview of Online Rental Services

For one flat monthly fee, you can rent as many movies as you like, but only a limited number of movies at one time. The number of movies you can have out at one time depends on the movie plan you’ve selected; more movies checked out = higher subscription cost.

There are no late fees, so you can keep the movies as long as you like. Postage is paid both ways, so there are no mailing fees. When you’re finished with a movie, just slip it into the postage paid mailer and drop it in your mailbox.

You determine the movies you wan to watch by building a queue. You can browse the online rental site, adding all of the movies you’d like to see to your queue, prioritizing the queue as you go. When it comes time to ship a movie, they grab the next available movie near the top of your queue and send it out.

Available Plans

NetFlix

Cost	Rentals at a time	Rentals per month
$23.99	4 DVD’s	Unlimited
$16.99	3 DVD’s	Unlimited
$13.99	2 DVD’s	Unlimited
$8.99	1 DVD’s	Unlimited
$4.99	1 DVD’s	2

BlockBuster

Blockbuster is a bit more complicated because they offer a mail-only option (similar to Netflix, but slightly cheaper), and the Total Access option. Total Access allows you to exchange a defined number of mailed DVD’s in person at a local BlockBuster store instead of returning them via the mail. Great for those days when you really want a new movie to watch.

With the mail only option, they are obviously targeting the price shoppers, but those plans make no sense to me. Blockbuster’s biggest differentiator is the in store exchanges; without them, they’re a poor Netflix knock-off. You can, however, switch from Total Access to mail only and vice versa whenever you like.

Cost	Rentals at a time	Rentals per month	Exchanges per month
$34.99	3 DVD’s	Unlimited	Unlimited
$19.99	3 DVD’s	Unlimited	5
$15.99	3 DVD’s	Unlimited	0
$29.99	2 DVD’s	Unlimited	Unlimited
$16.99	2 DVD’s	Unlimited	3
$13.99	2 DVD’s	Unlimited	0
$21.99	1 DVD	Unlimited	Unlimited
$11.99	1 DVD	Unlimited	2
$8.99	1 DVD	Unlimited	0
$9.99	1 DVD	2	2
$3.99	1 DVD	2	0

Personally, I’ve always used the 3-movies-at-a-time rental option. I can’t justify the minimal costs savings when I’m trading off the movie selection. Plus, we have wildly differing movies tastes in this house, so at any time we might have documentaries, art house flicks, mainstream movies, romantic comedies, and kids’ selections. But for homes with less eclectic tastes, you might be able to get by with two-at-a-time.

Feature Comparison

Depth and Breadth of Selection

Blockbuster advertises a selection of 75,000 movies, whereas NetFlix advertises a selection of 90,000 movies. Netflix has a broader selection of independent, art house, exercise, and specialty titles. The depth of selection differs dramatically. One of my chief complaints with Blockbuster is that I only had a rough idea of what movies might be sent to me. After building a queue of 100 movies with each service, Netflix listed all but one of my movies as immediately available. And they shipped them in the order that they were listed in my queue. With Blockbuster, almost all of the new releases in my queue were available only after a “short wait” or “long wait.” Over a third of the total movies in my queue were not available to be shipped, and I often received movies that were down in the 8 to 10 area of my queue.

Turnaround Time

Turnaround time for both services was good, but Blockbuster had the edge, turning around movies every two to three days, whereas Netflix almost always required 3 days. I’ve heard that Blockbuster has an agreement with the Post Office where the Post Office scans the bar codes of returned movies to alert Blockbuster to movies that will be delivered to their receiving centers in a day or so, giving them earlier access to inventory updates.

I have heard of people being throttled for renting too many movies too quickly from Netflix. I can’t vouch for the accuracy of this conclusion as it has never been my experience, but I’m not a heavy movie watcher. Should you choose Netflix and are a frequent movie watcher, keep an eye on your turnaround time.

Reviews

NetFlix offers both user and critic reviews, as compared to Blockbuster’s user reviews only. The quality of reviews seemed to be much higher on Netflix as well. Netflix seems to attract more movies buffs, or more buffs with tastes that are a bit outside the mainstream releases.

Software Quality

Both services offer nice Ajax interfaces to build and maintain your queue. This is huge step forward from the last time I used Blockbuster’s service — the queue management was atrocious at the time. Netflix edges Blockbuster out here, offering up similar movies to the ones in my queue as suggestions for further adds. This saved me quite a bit of time, and allowed me to build my queue in about half the time as it took at Blockbuster. Netflix also has a pretty good learning recommendation engine that begins to predict with reasonable accuracy movies you might like.

Rental Options

Blockbuster offers online rentals and instore rentals, provided you subscribe to the Total Access program. Netflix offers online rentals, and has a catalog of 7,000 movies that can be downloaded on demand.

Conclusion

For most people, I suspect the decision will come down to the ability to walk into a local video store to rent a movie. If you find this important, it’s tough to beat Blockbuster’s offering.

For me, Netflix’s depth of movies and consistent turnaround allowed me to time which movies I’d be receiving near the weekends, negating the need for in store rentals. The ease of queue management, a better recommendation engine, and a better selection of movies were icing on the cake. I kept Netflix and canceled Blockbuster this time around.

Signing Up

Both services offer free two-week trials, and both are easy (and hassle-free) to cancel, so if you’re on the fence, don’t feel bad about giving them both a test drive to see which one works best for you.

Blockbuster online
Netflix