I'm thinking about jumping into the waters, so I thought I'd do a little comparison of the rental plans.
I'm including the very long description of the NumberSlate plan because it's something really different from what the others offer.
Plan 1) FREE TRIAL! Rent 1 DVD from us. Exchange it as often you wish using our postage-paid envelopes. After the 15 DAY FREE TRIAL, you will be billed $9.95 per month till you cancel or change your plan. The 15 DAY FREE TRIAL is only for new Excalibur, DVD Rentz or Hit Flix customers.
Plan 2) Rent 2 DVDs from us. Exchange them as often you wish using our postage-paid envelopes. You will be billed $14.95 per month till you cancel or change your plan.
Plan 3) Rent 3 DVDs from us. Exchange them as often you wish using our postage-paid envelopes. You will be billed $19.95 per month till you cancel or change your plan.
...etc. (twelve plans in all)
Standard membership, 2 movies at a time for $15.54 per month. 3 for $18.76.
Number Slate DVD Circles
Number Slate is revolutionizing the way you rent movies
Introduction
Are you tired of being limited to only "3 movies at a time"? Tired of waiting several days for your DVD to arrive at the distribution center, then waiting several more days for the next one to come back? Tired of DVDs arriving damaged? Tired of uncertainty about what movie will arrive next?
Number Slate has solved all these problems. Soon you will be able to rent truly unlimited DVDs for only $9.95 per month.
The myth of "free shipping"
DVD rental companies all claim to have "free shipping," but this isn't actually true. You are paying for the shipping, the cost is just hidden in your monthly fee. Half of your monthly fee or more goes to pay for the shipping these companies claim is "free."
The myth of "unlimited rentals"
We all know the number of rentals you get in one month is not "unlimited," but is rather very limited, by the size of your rental plan, and the speed of the mail. In the best circumstances, an "unlimited" plan of 3 at a time can get you 9 or 10 movies in a month.
The annoying broken DVDs
Because DVD rental companies need to keep their shipping costs down, they have to keep the weight of each mailing below one ounce. This means there's no room for sufficient packaging to keep the DVDs safe, and sometimes they arrive at your door cracked. Not only is this annoying and time-consuming for you, it is costly for the DVD rental company, which also contributes to a higher price for your rental plan.
Number Slate's new DVD club has solved all these problems: truly unlimited rentals, lower cost, and shipping speeds twice as fast old-fashioned rental companies. And it's fun as well.
DVD Circles
With DVD Circles, each title will have a "DVD Circle" that you join. The members of the Circle will share the DVDs of that title, sending it from one member to the next until everyone has had a chance to watch it. If you think about it, this is exactly how all DVD rental companies work. You watch a movie, send it back to the company, then they send it out to the next person on the list. With Number Slate's new Movie Club, there is one gigantic difference: when you are done with a DVD, you will send it directly to the next person. We are cutting out the middle man: namely, us! That will cut shipping times in half. And when someone else is done with their movie, they will send it directly to you. You'll get your movies in half the time, with half the chance of one getting lost in the mail.
Each Circle is a miniature movie club. When you've seen it, you can share your thoughts on the movie with the other members of that DVD Circle on that title's message board.
(Note that popular titles will have more than one DVD per Circle, just like now. You won't have to worry that you'll never see a movie because there are hundreds of people in front of you in line.)
You will also have the ability to create your own Circles and invite people to join you. Say you want to watch French New Wave, or '70s slasher movies, or Hitchcock movies. You can create a list, say of Hitchcock movies. Then everyone who joins the Circle will watch all the movies in that Circle together.
You and your friends can also create a private movie club, so that you can choose together which movies you will watch, and join Circles as a group. If you have enough people in your club, you can reserve one or more discs only for you and your friends.
No More "3 at a time"
With DVD Circles, we have eliminated your maximum out at a time limit entirely. There is NO preset limit on how many movies you can have out at a time. The number is entirely in your control. When it is your turn to receive a Circle's movie, it will be sent to you, whether you already have two DVDs, or ten! You can watch as many movies as you want, at any speed you want. It's entirely up to you, with no preset limit hanging over your head.
How does it work?
You will receive a DVD in a new, padded envelope that will protect the DVD from breakage. You take as much time as you wish to watch it. As with our current system, there are no due dates and no late fees. When you are done with the movie, simply log onto the website, go to the Shipping Status page, and report that you are finished with the movie. The system will then give you the address to send the DVD to next. You can either write it on a new label (which will be provided) or print it out if you have a printer. Stick the label on the envelope, and drop it in the mail, same as you used to. In the mean time, every time you are next on a Circle's list, and the last person finishes watching the movie, they will send the disc to you, no matter how many you have out already.
Are there any drawbacks?
There is one minor drawback: each movie will require five minutes of your time to address before you can send it on to the next person.
You may have one other concern about addressing the envelopes. Have you ever used Ebay? When you buy something, you send the seller your mailing address, and they send you the item. Our new system will work the same way. Number Slate will provide your address (not your name--you'll be identified by your nickname) to the person who is sending the DVD. They will address the disc to you, just like Ebay.
One other detail needs to be noted. It is not possible for us to put postage on the envelopes when they are going directly from one member to the next, so you will have to add a stamp yourself, when you add the mailing label. If you want, you can buy stamps from us, or if you prefer, you can use whatever stamps you have lying around the house.
Each envelope will require $0.60 in postage. That is the price of a single two-ounce package. That is less than the cost of two one-ounce envelopes ($0.74 or more). But even paying for postage yourself, you will save money. If you are currently on the 3 at a time plan, for example, on average you rent 10 movies in a month, for $19.95. With this new system, you will pay $9.95 for the membership, and 10 X $0.60 = $6.00 for postage. That's only $15.95! A savings of 20% Since you are in complete control of the number of movies you see in a month, you only pay for what you watch. The more movies you see, the more you save. That's the secret of eliminating the so-called "free" shipping. By paying for it yourself, you eliminate the DVD company's ability charge you more than what it costs them.
So what do you think? Please email us with your comments, questions, and suggestions. Tell us if you will be interested in this new DVD Circles Club. What are the best features? If you don't like it, what needs to be improved? What could we do to make it appealing to you?
Summary
Advantages:
Disadvantages:
Something that might seem like a disadvantage at first, but isn't:
In addition, we will have a feedback system, similar to Ebay's. You can leave positive feedback for senders get the DVDs to you right away, and negative feedback for those who don't.
So which one are you leaning towards?
Larri and I tried Netflix (for free) for a month. I stopped because in order to get the same value as Diamond Head Video, we would have to watch 9 or 10 videos. That often gave us a day or two to watch two videos, and then we had to ship it out again.
The DVD circles seems appealing because of the price, but you have to buy stamp and check online--which may or may not be a hassle. The value of their plan would also depend on the quantity and quality of films they offered.
Posted by: Reid at January 30, 2004 05:49 PMYou bring up a good point about Diamond Head Video. There are still at least a hundred films there that I want to see, so maybe I should work my way through them first--it's definitely more cost-effective.
On the other hand, if the prices are comparable, it might be worth it to try one of the cheaper options (such as the DVD Circles) plan, especially if I'm riding the bus everywhere. Diamond Head is an economic option if I get all my discs back in time and actually watch what I rent. I'm normally pretty good about that, but you know. Sometimes not.
Posted by: Mitchell at February 1, 2004 11:17 PMYou should also consider getting a library card at UH. I know I used to have one before, and I think you can use the card to rent dvds for free! That's what I'm starting to do now. They have a bunch of stuff I want to watch.
Btw, with dvd circles, what if the village-idiots were to form a circle (maybe we other people included). We could just pass the discs to the next person without paying for postage. Could it work that way?
Posted by: Reid at February 2, 2004 06:27 AMI actually have a community card for UH-Manoa and one for HCC. The UH-Manoa card costs thirty bucks for a six-month period, though. I should check on HCC and see what they have, though, because it's close to my house and that card was free. Good idea.
If we all wanted to share DVDs with the DVD Circles thing, it wouldn't make sense of all of us to even be members. One of us could watch a movie, pass it on to the others, and then mail it to the next person on the list. There's no rush to get the DVDs back in the mail because the next ones on your list aren't waiting for you to return your current ones.
Still thinking about it.
Posted by: Mitchell at February 2, 2004 09:35 AMOne person signing up, and the five of us splitting the cost might not be a bad way to do it.
Posted by: Reid at February 2, 2004 12:53 PMHere's a quick update. I tried to sign up for NumberSlate about a week ago, but something about the website was completely not working--I couldn't get past the initial, put-in-your-email-and-password phase to the actual paying by credit-card phase.
Last night I got an email announcing the introduction of the DVD-Circles, so I went to the site and tried again. This time, disco. I immediately added thirty-four mainstream titles to my list and scanned the discussion forum. There a quite a few members with some beefs, including something NumberSlate never mentioned. It lists a lot of great titles NetFlix doesn't have, but it doesn't actually have all these titles in stock. Once a DVD-Circle gets to a certain number, I guess, NumberSlate purchases the disc and mails it to the person at the top of the list.
This means that if you want your money's worth, you have to put a bunch of movies on your list, since a lot of the stuff you want will take a while before NumberSlate even purchases it.
Of my thirty-four titles, sixteen are not in stock. Of the eighteen remaining titles, the ones NumberSlate has, four are represented by two discs, one by three, and one by five (Full-Frontal, which only has four people in the circle). Of these eighteen, I'm first or second in line for six.
This, of course, doesn't take into account the length of time the people ahead of me will have the DVDs, so obviously, thirty-four titles is not enough for my list. I'll give you an update in a week or so, when I should start seeing some kind of movement.
I'll also let you know what I get, and if you wanna see it, we can work something out.
Posted by: Mitchell at February 7, 2004 01:46 AMI got an email this morning informing me that four of my choices have been shipped. It's a start.
Posted by: Mitchell at February 9, 2004 11:02 AMSomeone mentioned Number Slate doesn't own many DVD titles. The truth is they only have about a tenth of the ones they list on their site. They pretend they're available, but they're not. You can see this for yourself if you "browse" their titles. Nearly all of them, when you click on "View Circle," show zero disks available. It's pretty pathetic.
Posted by: Bob at March 18, 2004 06:33 PMIt's true (and truly disappointing) that they don't have nearly as many titles in stock as they lead you to believe. However, I had no problem finding a couple of hundred things I wouldn't mind paying under two bucks to see--particularly if I wasn't in a rush to see stuff and get discs back in the mail, as one must do with NetFlix (with a three-day mail-time between the shipping center and Honolulu, you're talking about six days from the day you mail your discs to the day you get the next three).
I'm willing to cut Number Slate a little bit of slack as it works the kinks out (and there are quite a few). As it is, I saw eleven movies in my first month at a price of $16.60 (I'm a teacher, and the second half of February and first half of March are crazy): that's ten bucks for the membership and sixty cents each for postage. I currently have, in my possession, seven discs I can view at my leisure.
So I'm sticking with it, for now.
Posted by: Mitchell at March 18, 2004 11:17 PM