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I have fond memories of the Netflix DVD service. In high school, I would get a disk, immediately burn a copy, and return it the same day. I could get about 20-2

I have fond memories of the Netflix DVD service. In high school, I would get a disk, immediately burn a copy, and return it the same day. I could get about 20-25 DVDs a month on the 3-DVD plan this way. Since many DVDs were dual-layered but consumer DVD-Rs were single-layered, I had to transcode the video to fit on the smaller DVD. This resulted in the fan on my family's shared desktop going haywire, prompting many inquries from my parents. I think I told them I had to defrag the hard drive. At some point, towards the end of each month, Netflix started delaying how quickly DVDs would be sent out if you used this many. I think they settled a class-action lawsuit over this, and I was rewarded a free month. After a few years, when I had a couple shoeboxes of DVDs, hard drives started getting large enough that I could just store all the movies on an external drive. This was good since the consumer DVD-Rs didn't last that long -- the ink would degrade, ususally towards the center of the disk, which would result in a movie sometimes freezing in the last 15-minutes or so. A few instances of this with friends over was enough for me to make the final transition. I do miss the process of the physical disks though. It was really excited every time a new one would come. I would take some time labeling them, drawing out the movie title in the production font. And friends loved to browse through my collection when they came over. They were amazed by how much I'd amassed. Nowadays, with all the content available, my Plex server with 10x as many movies barely elicits a shrug. But I really owe Netflix for exposing me to so much at such a formative time in my life. Being able to see any film I wanted in the early 2000s really broadened my perspective on the world. Their recommendation system at the time was top notch, and I watched tons of things I would have never seen otherwise.

tmountain 4y ago
I had a similar experience copying DVDs from the Redbox (automated rental kiosk). I felt so accomplished getting all the right software and amassing a huge collection of pirated disks (stacks of DVD organizers in my room). Streaming went mainstream a little later, and I don't even remember what I did with all the disks, but I probably either gave them away or donated them...
- olyjohn 4y ago
  I had a few binders full of movies on CDs that I had... obtained. When I ripped the movies onto them, the quality seemed acceptable. Damn good actually when you played them back on a CRT TV. Now when I try to watch them, I see how terrible they look. At that time, we didn't have DVD burners (or they were super expensive), so I would have to transcode the DVD into that weird DivX codec so it would fit on the 700MB CD. I was going to go through the CDs one day and copy the movies back onto a hard drive, but the quality was so bad of the rips. I had also found that despite being stored in a binder in a closet, many of the discs had also deteriorated to where I couldn't copy the file back off of it.
willcipriano 4y ago
Had the exact same experience, ripping and dropping the dvds back at the post office a few hours later,even getting throttled towards the end of the month. Used to use this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD_Shrink https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD_Shrink
- KyeRussell 4y ago
  Oh man! DVD Shrink. I haven’t once enough about that in the past…15 years, at least.
mrits 4y ago
A lot of people don't remember Blockbuster reacted pretty fast to Netflix. They let you rent a couple movies out at once for something like $20/month. The killer part was when they added playstation games for a little more. I was probably a bit bias because I was in college and taking a date to blockbuster was the norm.
- dumbfounder 4y ago
  Yes, going to Blockbuster with friends was a fun start to movie night. It was more of an event. But "Blockbuster and chill" just doesn't have the same ring to it.
- skinnymuch 4y ago
  Blockbuster did amazingly at competing with Netflix. Their downfall was bad leadership and Carl Icahn
rmorey 4y ago
When blockbuster was going out of business they offered a free trial of their similar service for video games. I had soft modded my wii to rip play games from a hard drive, so I got about 20 or so games ripped to my hard drive this way. Good times. Till my roommate in college formatted my hard drive and I lost all my games (not just the blockbuster ones). This guy spat on me, and I forgave him for that, but never for this. God damn it Paul :(
- filmgirlcw 4y ago
  Yeah, I didn't rip a bunch of Netflix stuff because I'm a movie collector, but I used to abuse Blockbuster's video game service and rip Xbox and Wii games from on the reg. I still have my modded Xbox from 2002 with a bunch of old games on it (my hacked Wii still works too).
filmgirlcw 4y ago
I did something similar -- though I didn't burn as many discs (my friends did, however) because I've always been a collector. But like you, Netflix exposed me to so many movies and TV shows I would have otherwise not been able to see (or afford, and I used to spend a couple hundred a month on physical media!) The recommendation system was so good -- it's a shame they had to get rid of it because of the lawsuit. I don't think it is just hindsight but I really do think it was better than the recommendation system they have now for the streaming product.
- trevcanhuman 4y ago
  could you explain a little more about the lawsuit ? I don't understand why they'd have to stop using their recommendation system.
  - awad 4y ago
    Believe it's referring to this: https://www.wired.com/2010/03/netflix-cancels-contest/ https://www.wired.com/2010/03/netflix-cancels-contest/
    - mhb 4y ago
      Interesting. But why couldn't they continue using the existing recommendation system which was excellent.
      - filmgirlcw 4y ago
        I guess they could have, but data gets stale after a while. I have to think that the real problem is that the things Netflix wanted to start to optimize for different things rather than recommendation accuracy. They have new metrics like watch time, time engaged with the app (binge watching), watch to completion, rewatch time, watch first weekend, etc. I don't think they care about offering the best recommendations anymore, just about doing whatever they can to keep you tuned into the app as long as possible. Those two things aren't necessarily at odds, but they aren't the same thing either. Like, today Netflix is going to want to optimize for getting the most eyeballs on its originals versus content they've merely licensed from the catalog. When it was offering DVD rentals, it didn't have original content so having good recommendations was the sort of thing that would keep the service "sticky" and prevent subscriber churn.
mentos 4y ago
Ha I had the same experience renting Xbox games from Blockbuster. Got to the point where I'd rent a stack of games, rip them to my modded Xbox in my car then return them to the drop bin to perplexed faces of employees inside who had just rung me up an hour earlier. Don't think I played any of the games, for me the game was just amassing a library. For what its worth I'm in game development now ha so maybe I've atoned for some of these 'crimes'
- awad 4y ago
  You're touching on something I've always been fascinated about...the game being the collection and building of the library itself. I suppose it's not that different from any other hobby centered around collectibles and yet with media, especially digital media, it always felt a bit different. I'm not sure why.
  - lathiat 4y ago
    I think Leo Laporte once said something along the lines of some people are tool people and other people are doing people. Some like to obsess over the tools, some just want to get work done. I saw another similar quote about amassing knowledge is pointless if you don't actually do something with it.
    - skinnymuch 4y ago
      I think life is too complex to know if we use amassed knowledge enough. Or I tell myself that to feel better.
    - Gigachad 4y ago
      I’m always amused at how home cooks all have the meme $300 knives, then you see a pro chef explain their gear and it’s a $30 knife with plastic handle.
- tquinn 4y ago
  That's awesome, I've never heard of anyone ripping from their car. It's interesting that you were collecting for the sake of collection and not gaming. It reminds me of people that go full tilt building PC gaming rigs, but never actually play anything.
treve 4y ago
> the ink would degrade, usually towards the center of the disk, which would result in a movie sometimes freezing in the last 15-minutes or so. CDs are usually read from the middle, going outward. Unlike records. If I had to guess it was probably the outside that started flaking
- dml2135 4y ago
  Yea, I don't remember if it was the outside or the inside honestly. What I do remember is that it was the side where the end of the movie was!
froggertoaster 4y ago
Only Hacker News could make piracy sound so eloquent and - dare I say - romantic.
- tshaddox 4y ago
  Per the halting problem, it would be impossible to say if this was merely time shifting and thus fair use. (Not counting the DeCSS step, since access control circumvention is explicitly prohibited by the DMCA, although I’m not sure of the current status of that law.)
  - toast0 4y ago
    Does the time shifting doctrine really apply to rentals?
    - tshaddox 4y ago
      I’m very out of date on this stuff, but I thought the more relevant thing was that you’re not supposed to keep permanent copies of stuff around. I believe the original court cases were about recording live TV to watch later, presumably under the assumption that the video tapes would be recorded over quickly (as was common in those days). In that case I don’t see why doing the same with a rental wouldn’t also be fair use.
      - saalweachter 4y ago
        The standard I used to hear for copying library materials was "lower quality reproductions for personal use".
- ta1243 4y ago
  Johnny Depp did a good job
- SoftTalker 4y ago
  DVDs pre-date my youth. I used to do it with records. There was a record store where you could “buy” a used record for like $5 and they’d take it back within a week or so and refund $4. They also sold a lot of cassette tapes. For music it makes sense to me, I’ll listen to records I like over and over. For movies, not so much. Once I watch a movie I have very little desire to watch it again.
fortran77 4y ago
> ink would degrade, ususally towards the center of the disk, which would result in a movie sometimes freezing in the last 15-minutes or so. DVDs are read/written from the center out.
tshaddox 4y ago
I did the exact same thing in high school. I would rush home from school, and on a good day I could get all 3 DVDs ripped and back to the post office before 5pm for same-day turnaround. I even remember taking note of how the shipping delays differed based on the day of the week. I think if you got the phase right you could get two entire turnarounds per week. For the dual layer discs I would need to keep enough hard drive space for the raw image and then do the encode and burn after the post office run. During summer break I would try to do a month or two of the 8 DVD plan, but that was too stressful. I also remember trying a few small online businesses that did the same thing but with more interesting curated DVD collections. I don’t think any of them lasted long. Heck, some of those could have been a single person mailing out and restocking discs.
- troupe 4y ago
  I wonder if Netflix DVDs going away will create a market for some of those small businesses again.
  - tshaddox 4y ago
    It’s conceivable given the laughable behavior of streaming services lately (e.g. HBO removing recent flagship original content from its streaming service is just ludicrous). Of course if it became common again it would probably be met with a new era of IP lawsuits, even though it seemed to have been settled previously. Oh, and it would likely only be doable legally with content that had a legitimate physical media release, which is becoming somewhat rare.
  - coredog64 4y ago
    I wonder if we’ll see a group of Netflix employees take their hoarded cash comp and buy out the business from Netflix to make a go of it. Probably more likely that Redbox will soak up most of the business and we’ll lose out on the interesting long-tail part of this.
- james-skemp 4y ago
  > I even remember taking note of how the shipping delays differed based on the day of the week. I think if you got the phase right you could get two entire turnarounds per week. I need to go in and fix broken links, but I tracked 5+ years of Netflix mailings (dropped DVDs into my sixth year). What I rented, when I got it and shipped it back, when they received and mailed another, and what mailer I got (local address or further away). One of the posts: https://words.strivinglife.com/post/netflix-shipping-for-madison-wi-year-3-part-2/ https://words.strivinglife.com/post/netflix-shipping-for-mad... It was definitely interesting to have a record of how turnaround changed over the course of the month).
madaxe_again 4y ago
Man, life was complicated if you didn’t have friends with access to the markets in Aberdeen in Hong Kong. I’d just write up a list of stuff I fancied and the Hong Kong kids would show up at school at the start of term with suitcases laden with fresh VCD warez, games, you name it - everything you’d asked for, and then some, and usually stuff that hadn’t hit the cinemas yet. This was late 90’s, so broadband was still very nascent - downloading a film was still an expensive and time consuming mission.
867-5309 4y ago
I think the UK version of Netflix DVD must have been LoveFilm, which Amazon promptly acquired, or, killed
- SifJar 4y ago
  Netflix also (I think briefly) offered DVD rental in UK, competing with LoveFilm. LoveFilm did continue for a while after the Amazon acquisition, both as DVD rental and with streaming added (LoveFilm Instant, if I remember correctly), which eventually got rebranded into Amazon Instant Video
- cjrp 4y ago
  We must have gone through about 20 free trials for Lovefilm during uni, using subtly different addresses with typos so they'd still be delivered but not show up as dupe accounts. Good times.
867-5309 4y ago
>Netflix started delaying how quickly DVDs would be sent out you got throttled! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD-by-mail#Throttling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD-by-mail#Throttling
treeman79 4y ago
I lived next to a post office distribution hub. Would drop dvds at Post office in morning. Get home and new dvd would be in my mailbox. Watch all of em. Return them in morning. Rinse and repeat until they started delaying how it took for the DVDs to arrive.
shusaku 4y ago
What’s the deal with piracy and hoarding? I also knew big torrent users who were constantly filling disk after disk. How many of those copies did you actually watch? Maybe it was all for the thrill of the crime!
refurb 4y ago
My cousin did this. By gaming the promotions - get a free month, pay for a month, cancel, get promo for free month, repeat - i think he got maybe an 8 month subscription and only paid for 3. And he’d do the same - as soon as a movie arrived, make a copy, drop it back in the mail that night. I think the max was maybe 24 movies a month. He amassed a collection of over 200 movies that way. Then he cancelled and had movies to watch for the next 2-3 years.
brianstorms 4y ago
Have been a Netflix customer since about 2000. I used to blog about them all the time in 2000-2001, did full writeups on their UI design, even the red envelope design. Had a dialog going to Neil Hunt their CTO/product guy. Even visited Netflix and had lunch with him once over the blog posts. I'd say they made about half the changes I urged them to make. Which was fun to see, that it made a difference. As for their recommendation system: I always found it to be abysmal and worthless. It recommended films in genres I had never watched, had no interest in, like children's films, sports films, other niche genres. So as an experiment I started rating films Netflix would recommend in those genres to me, as having 1 out of 5 stars, the lowest rating you could give. [At some point they added "Not Interested" and I'd give it that rating. Ha! It was about as effective as pressing a pedestrian walk button at an intersection.] I did this for months. Any spare time I had while waiting for something else to get done, I'd pop into Netflix and rate rate rate. Got really good at it. Kept doing it for more months. Eventually I rated over 20,000 movies, all in genres I had absolutely zero interest in ever watching anything in. It made no difference. Netflix still recommended films in all kinds of genres, regardless of even if I had rated EVERY TITLE IN THAT GENRE as "Not Interested" or 1 out of 5 stars. I once got on an elevator with Reed Hastings at a conference. As we rode the elevator I told him the story. He was ROTFL by the end. Laughter but as in a "too bad for you, I could care less" kind of way. He said no way they would not fix anything. He absolutely did not care whatsoever that Netflix recommended movies at the genre level when I absolutely hated the genre. It was quite revealing, his "I couldn't care less" reaction.
- pbj1968 4y ago
  Pedestrian buttons change the lights. This is easily testable. What an odd analogy.
  - brianstorms 4y ago
    Oh phooey. It's a longstanding joke that the "Don't Walk" lights don't change to "Walk" any sooner if you press the button. Just like the "close door" button in elevators doesn't make the doors close any sooner than they normally would.
retrocryptid 4y ago
"COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT IS YOUR BEST ENTERTAINMENT VALUE"
globalise83 4y ago
Ah, yes, the good old days where stormtroopers from the Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT) could burst through the door at any time.
sizzle 4y ago
This was me! I loved the thrill of ripping dvds to .iso and figuring out how to burn it to the 100 pack of smelly dvd-r spindles I picked up at Black Friday every year haha I probably never watched the dvds I burned again but this seriously felt like the greatest victory ever to not have to deal with/rewind clunky VCR tapes in my young adhd dopamine craving brain!
okdood64 4y ago
> my Plex server with 10x as many movies How did you fill your Plex server? Where did you acquire the movies?

tmountain 4y ago

I had a similar experience copying DVDs from the Redbox (automated rental kiosk). I felt so accomplished getting all the right software and amassing a huge collection of pirated disks (stacks of DVD organizers in my room). Streaming went mainstream a little later, and I don't even remember what I did with all the disks, but I probably either gave them away or donated them...

olyjohn 4y ago
I had a few binders full of movies on CDs that I had... obtained. When I ripped the movies onto them, the quality seemed acceptable. Damn good actually when you played them back on a CRT TV. Now when I try to watch them, I see how terrible they look. At that time, we didn't have DVD burners (or they were super expensive), so I would have to transcode the DVD into that weird DivX codec so it would fit on the 700MB CD. I was going to go through the CDs one day and copy the movies back onto a hard drive, but the quality was so bad of the rips. I had also found that despite being stored in a binder in a closet, many of the discs had also deteriorated to where I couldn't copy the file back off of it.

willcipriano 4y ago

Had the exact same experience, ripping and dropping the dvds back at the post office a few hours later,even getting throttled towards the end of the month. Used to use this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD_Shrink https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD_Shrink

KyeRussell 4y ago
Oh man! DVD Shrink. I haven’t once enough about that in the past…15 years, at least.

mrits 4y ago

A lot of people don't remember Blockbuster reacted pretty fast to Netflix. They let you rent a couple movies out at once for something like $20/month. The killer part was when they added playstation games for a little more. I was probably a bit bias because I was in college and taking a date to blockbuster was the norm.

dumbfounder 4y ago
Yes, going to Blockbuster with friends was a fun start to movie night. It was more of an event. But "Blockbuster and chill" just doesn't have the same ring to it.
skinnymuch 4y ago
Blockbuster did amazingly at competing with Netflix. Their downfall was bad leadership and Carl Icahn

rmorey 4y ago

When blockbuster was going out of business they offered a free trial of their similar service for video games. I had soft modded my wii to rip play games from a hard drive, so I got about 20 or so games ripped to my hard drive this way. Good times. Till my roommate in college formatted my hard drive and I lost all my games (not just the blockbuster ones). This guy spat on me, and I forgave him for that, but never for this. God damn it Paul :(

filmgirlcw 4y ago
Yeah, I didn't rip a bunch of Netflix stuff because I'm a movie collector, but I used to abuse Blockbuster's video game service and rip Xbox and Wii games from on the reg. I still have my modded Xbox from 2002 with a bunch of old games on it (my hacked Wii still works too).

filmgirlcw 4y ago

I did something similar -- though I didn't burn as many discs (my friends did, however) because I've always been a collector. But like you, Netflix exposed me to so many movies and TV shows I would have otherwise not been able to see (or afford, and I used to spend a couple hundred a month on physical media!) The recommendation system was so good -- it's a shame they had to get rid of it because of the lawsuit. I don't think it is just hindsight but I really do think it was better than the recommendation system they have now for the streaming product.

trevcanhuman 4y ago
could you explain a little more about the lawsuit ? I don't understand why they'd have to stop using their recommendation system.
- awad 4y ago
  Believe it's referring to this: https://www.wired.com/2010/03/netflix-cancels-contest/ https://www.wired.com/2010/03/netflix-cancels-contest/
  - mhb 4y ago
    Interesting. But why couldn't they continue using the existing recommendation system which was excellent.
    - filmgirlcw 4y ago
      I guess they could have, but data gets stale after a while. I have to think that the real problem is that the things Netflix wanted to start to optimize for different things rather than recommendation accuracy. They have new metrics like watch time, time engaged with the app (binge watching), watch to completion, rewatch time, watch first weekend, etc. I don't think they care about offering the best recommendations anymore, just about doing whatever they can to keep you tuned into the app as long as possible. Those two things aren't necessarily at odds, but they aren't the same thing either. Like, today Netflix is going to want to optimize for getting the most eyeballs on its originals versus content they've merely licensed from the catalog. When it was offering DVD rentals, it didn't have original content so having good recommendations was the sort of thing that would keep the service "sticky" and prevent subscriber churn.

mentos 4y ago

Ha I had the same experience renting Xbox games from Blockbuster. Got to the point where I'd rent a stack of games, rip them to my modded Xbox in my car then return them to the drop bin to perplexed faces of employees inside who had just rung me up an hour earlier. Don't think I played any of the games, for me the game was just amassing a library. For what its worth I'm in game development now ha so maybe I've atoned for some of these 'crimes'

awad 4y ago
You're touching on something I've always been fascinated about...the game being the collection and building of the library itself. I suppose it's not that different from any other hobby centered around collectibles and yet with media, especially digital media, it always felt a bit different. I'm not sure why.
- lathiat 4y ago
  I think Leo Laporte once said something along the lines of some people are tool people and other people are doing people. Some like to obsess over the tools, some just want to get work done. I saw another similar quote about amassing knowledge is pointless if you don't actually do something with it.
  - skinnymuch 4y ago
    I think life is too complex to know if we use amassed knowledge enough. Or I tell myself that to feel better.
  - Gigachad 4y ago
    I’m always amused at how home cooks all have the meme $300 knives, then you see a pro chef explain their gear and it’s a $30 knife with plastic handle.
tquinn 4y ago
That's awesome, I've never heard of anyone ripping from their car. It's interesting that you were collecting for the sake of collection and not gaming. It reminds me of people that go full tilt building PC gaming rigs, but never actually play anything.

treve 4y ago

> the ink would degrade, usually towards the center of the disk, which would result in a movie sometimes freezing in the last 15-minutes or so. CDs are usually read from the middle, going outward. Unlike records. If I had to guess it was probably the outside that started flaking

dml2135 4y ago
Yea, I don't remember if it was the outside or the inside honestly. What I do remember is that it was the side where the end of the movie was!

froggertoaster 4y ago

Only Hacker News could make piracy sound so eloquent and - dare I say - romantic.

tshaddox 4y ago
Per the halting problem, it would be impossible to say if this was merely time shifting and thus fair use. (Not counting the DeCSS step, since access control circumvention is explicitly prohibited by the DMCA, although I’m not sure of the current status of that law.)
- toast0 4y ago
  Does the time shifting doctrine really apply to rentals?
  - tshaddox 4y ago
    I’m very out of date on this stuff, but I thought the more relevant thing was that you’re not supposed to keep permanent copies of stuff around. I believe the original court cases were about recording live TV to watch later, presumably under the assumption that the video tapes would be recorded over quickly (as was common in those days). In that case I don’t see why doing the same with a rental wouldn’t also be fair use.
    - saalweachter 4y ago
      The standard I used to hear for copying library materials was "lower quality reproductions for personal use".
ta1243 4y ago
Johnny Depp did a good job
SoftTalker 4y ago
DVDs pre-date my youth. I used to do it with records. There was a record store where you could “buy” a used record for like $5 and they’d take it back within a week or so and refund $4. They also sold a lot of cassette tapes. For music it makes sense to me, I’ll listen to records I like over and over. For movies, not so much. Once I watch a movie I have very little desire to watch it again.

fortran77 4y ago

> ink would degrade, ususally towards the center of the disk, which would result in a movie sometimes freezing in the last 15-minutes or so. DVDs are read/written from the center out.

tshaddox 4y ago

I did the exact same thing in high school. I would rush home from school, and on a good day I could get all 3 DVDs ripped and back to the post office before 5pm for same-day turnaround. I even remember taking note of how the shipping delays differed based on the day of the week. I think if you got the phase right you could get two entire turnarounds per week. For the dual layer discs I would need to keep enough hard drive space for the raw image and then do the encode and burn after the post office run. During summer break I would try to do a month or two of the 8 DVD plan, but that was too stressful. I also remember trying a few small online businesses that did the same thing but with more interesting curated DVD collections. I don’t think any of them lasted long. Heck, some of those could have been a single person mailing out and restocking discs.

troupe 4y ago
I wonder if Netflix DVDs going away will create a market for some of those small businesses again.
- tshaddox 4y ago
  It’s conceivable given the laughable behavior of streaming services lately (e.g. HBO removing recent flagship original content from its streaming service is just ludicrous). Of course if it became common again it would probably be met with a new era of IP lawsuits, even though it seemed to have been settled previously. Oh, and it would likely only be doable legally with content that had a legitimate physical media release, which is becoming somewhat rare.
- coredog64 4y ago
  I wonder if we’ll see a group of Netflix employees take their hoarded cash comp and buy out the business from Netflix to make a go of it. Probably more likely that Redbox will soak up most of the business and we’ll lose out on the interesting long-tail part of this.
james-skemp 4y ago
> I even remember taking note of how the shipping delays differed based on the day of the week. I think if you got the phase right you could get two entire turnarounds per week. I need to go in and fix broken links, but I tracked 5+ years of Netflix mailings (dropped DVDs into my sixth year). What I rented, when I got it and shipped it back, when they received and mailed another, and what mailer I got (local address or further away). One of the posts: https://words.strivinglife.com/post/netflix-shipping-for-madison-wi-year-3-part-2/ https://words.strivinglife.com/post/netflix-shipping-for-mad... It was definitely interesting to have a record of how turnaround changed over the course of the month).

madaxe_again 4y ago

Man, life was complicated if you didn’t have friends with access to the markets in Aberdeen in Hong Kong. I’d just write up a list of stuff I fancied and the Hong Kong kids would show up at school at the start of term with suitcases laden with fresh VCD warez, games, you name it - everything you’d asked for, and then some, and usually stuff that hadn’t hit the cinemas yet. This was late 90’s, so broadband was still very nascent - downloading a film was still an expensive and time consuming mission.

867-5309 4y ago

I think the UK version of Netflix DVD must have been LoveFilm, which Amazon promptly acquired, or, killed

SifJar 4y ago
Netflix also (I think briefly) offered DVD rental in UK, competing with LoveFilm. LoveFilm did continue for a while after the Amazon acquisition, both as DVD rental and with streaming added (LoveFilm Instant, if I remember correctly), which eventually got rebranded into Amazon Instant Video
cjrp 4y ago
We must have gone through about 20 free trials for Lovefilm during uni, using subtly different addresses with typos so they'd still be delivered but not show up as dupe accounts. Good times.

867-5309 4y ago

>Netflix started delaying how quickly DVDs would be sent out you got throttled! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD-by-mail#Throttling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD-by-mail#Throttling

treeman79 4y ago

I lived next to a post office distribution hub. Would drop dvds at Post office in morning. Get home and new dvd would be in my mailbox. Watch all of em. Return them in morning. Rinse and repeat until they started delaying how it took for the DVDs to arrive.

shusaku 4y ago

What’s the deal with piracy and hoarding? I also knew big torrent users who were constantly filling disk after disk. How many of those copies did you actually watch? Maybe it was all for the thrill of the crime!

refurb 4y ago

My cousin did this. By gaming the promotions - get a free month, pay for a month, cancel, get promo for free month, repeat - i think he got maybe an 8 month subscription and only paid for 3. And he’d do the same - as soon as a movie arrived, make a copy, drop it back in the mail that night. I think the max was maybe 24 movies a month. He amassed a collection of over 200 movies that way. Then he cancelled and had movies to watch for the next 2-3 years.

brianstorms 4y ago

Have been a Netflix customer since about 2000. I used to blog about them all the time in 2000-2001, did full writeups on their UI design, even the red envelope design. Had a dialog going to Neil Hunt their CTO/product guy. Even visited Netflix and had lunch with him once over the blog posts. I'd say they made about half the changes I urged them to make. Which was fun to see, that it made a difference. As for their recommendation system: I always found it to be abysmal and worthless. It recommended films in genres I had never watched, had no interest in, like children's films, sports films, other niche genres. So as an experiment I started rating films Netflix would recommend in those genres to me, as having 1 out of 5 stars, the lowest rating you could give. [At some point they added "Not Interested" and I'd give it that rating. Ha! It was about as effective as pressing a pedestrian walk button at an intersection.] I did this for months. Any spare time I had while waiting for something else to get done, I'd pop into Netflix and rate rate rate. Got really good at it. Kept doing it for more months. Eventually I rated over 20,000 movies, all in genres I had absolutely zero interest in ever watching anything in. It made no difference. Netflix still recommended films in all kinds of genres, regardless of even if I had rated EVERY TITLE IN THAT GENRE as "Not Interested" or 1 out of 5 stars. I once got on an elevator with Reed Hastings at a conference. As we rode the elevator I told him the story. He was ROTFL by the end. Laughter but as in a "too bad for you, I could care less" kind of way. He said no way they would not fix anything. He absolutely did not care whatsoever that Netflix recommended movies at the genre level when I absolutely hated the genre. It was quite revealing, his "I couldn't care less" reaction.

pbj1968 4y ago
Pedestrian buttons change the lights. This is easily testable. What an odd analogy.
- brianstorms 4y ago
  Oh phooey. It's a longstanding joke that the "Don't Walk" lights don't change to "Walk" any sooner if you press the button. Just like the "close door" button in elevators doesn't make the doors close any sooner than they normally would.

retrocryptid 4y ago

"COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT IS YOUR BEST ENTERTAINMENT VALUE"

globalise83 4y ago

Ah, yes, the good old days where stormtroopers from the Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT) could burst through the door at any time.

sizzle 4y ago

This was me! I loved the thrill of ripping dvds to .iso and figuring out how to burn it to the 100 pack of smelly dvd-r spindles I picked up at Black Friday every year haha I probably never watched the dvds I burned again but this seriously felt like the greatest victory ever to not have to deal with/rewind clunky VCR tapes in my young adhd dopamine craving brain!

okdood64 4y ago

> my Plex server with 10x as many movies How did you fill your Plex server? Where did you acquire the movies?