Brian Dear wrote up a review of a small NetFlix competitor that wants to focus on DVD rentals for foreign, indie and rare movies. They're quite small, and don't have the knack of this
DVD-rental-by-mail thing yet:
Customer: In a nutshell. And I thought to myself, "a little French farce will do the trick," so, I curtailed my websurfing activites, sallied forth, and infiltrated your site of webitude to negotiate the rental of some fine unusual cinematographs!
Owner: Come again?
Customer: I want to rent some DVDs.
Yep. Brian's review of this DVD-renting service is styled after the venerable "Cheese Shop" sketch. Quite an amusing review, but it doesn't speak well to the quality of this NetFlix-wantabe...
Greencine
autarch on 2003-11-06T23:44:06
I just switched to Greencine from Netflix about 2 weeks ago. So far, so good.
The reasons for my switch were:
- Netflix seems clueless on many levels. Witness the fact that for about a year or more, they've had 6 of 8 DVDs for the Tenchi Universe anime series. All 8 DVDs have been available for a long time, but Netflix has never bought the last 2.
- Netflix has many Korean movies categorized under "Southeast Asian". Interesting conception of Southeast Asia.
- On more than one ocassion, I've emailed Netflix about these and other problems. All I ever get back is an automated response, and the fix never happens.
- When I first joined Netflix (in 2000), I suggested that they needed a way to fix the order of a subset of DVDs in your queue. If you're renting an anime series, you don't want to receive disks 4-6 before 1-3, regardless of availability. They only this year added this feature! Greencine, a smaller, younger outfit, has it, and their version is much more flexible, as it lets you create your own arbitrary sets from any disks in your queue.
- Before I ever became a Greencine member, I emailed them some corrections for some films. They fixed this within days. Since I've joined, I've emailed a number of others, and they've been quite good about making the corrections, and even better yet, I actually get a response from a human.
- Since joining Greencine, I've already been able to watch one DVD Netflix doesn't have, the Read or Die anime OVA, and there's a bunch more in my queue that I couldn't get on Netflix.
Since my film tastes run to foreign films (especially Asian) and anime, and since Greencine also has plenty of Hollywood crap, it seems ideal. We'll see how well it goes. There are a number of disks listed as the Greencine equivalent of "long wait" in my queue. Also, the average transport time is longer, because I live in Minneapolis, and Greencine is in SF. Netflix has a Minneapolis distro center, but so far it's only been 3 days each way, and Netflix was about 2.
