I’d been using netflix for a couple years through my fiancee, when I finally decided to get my own account. I tell ya, entertainment rental is a marvelous thing. With the average cost of HDDVD and DVD running anywhere from $15-$30 per title – wasting money on that sort of thing is absurd considering for $15 one can view tons more.
I’ve got a huge collection of DVD’s. I spent anywhere from $10-$20 on them over the course of a couple years… new, the collection is worth a few thousand dollars. How often do I watch any of them? Can’t recall the last time I did. The industry makes a fortune reselling movies on DVD – where in the days of VHS a movie went from the theater to a tape over the course of a year or more, now it is not uncommon to see a movie come out of the theaters and be on disc within a month or more.
This morning I was poking around the Netflix site to see what the new releases were and caught the “Preview” button. Upon clicking it, I got rapid-fire previews of movies that I may like based on my past rentals and the ability to add them to my queue. It was outstanding! Sure, reviews are good enough, but then again “A Scanner Darkly” had some pretty good ones and I learned my lesson real fast.
Course, it only cost me about $1 to rent that bomb instead of spending $20 and finding out the hard way. I’ve already been using Gamefly to a similar end for over a year myself, and the average game runs at least $60 these days. I spend $240 a year to rent as many games as I want. That’d buy me 4 games on the open market that I’d likely play once and forget, or trade in at a massive loss.
Do yourself a favor, get Netflix, get Gamefly. Save some cash.
