Apparently Richard Corliss at Time either drew the short straw or lost a bar bet, because here at this link is a short essay about why NetFlix will lead to the downfall of the American Way Of Life (TM). He thinks we should all cancel our NetFlix accounts and go back to the old way of doing things, which apparently involves walking to the neighborhood video store and interacting with the film connoisseur behind the counter who got a Ph.D. in cinema just so he can advise you philistines on the next obscure flick with subtitles you Just Have To See.
If you can find, or have ever been to a video store like this, feel free to lambaste me in the comments. I haven't.
Here, for those of you who just came here from Mars or wherever, is a short history of the video store.
It starts in the late 1970s, when one tape would cost something like $70. Since this is about $200 in today's money, and no one would dream of shelling out that kind of money just so one could watch The Godfather anytime one wished, the few people who owned VCRs in either VHS or Betamax format back then (retail price $1995, or about six grand in today's money) rented them at small specialty stores, probably the same place where the VCR was purchased.
Eventually, the price of both VCRs and tapes dropped, and the rental trade shifted to numerous Mom and Pop establishments. You could, from time to time, run across a few rather obscure titles, including foreign films, independent films, and soft-core pornography. This is the video store being described by Corliss. Most of these were gone by the mid-1990s.
I must point out that NetFlix did not destroy the Mom and Pop video store. The blame for that rests squarely on the shoulders of Blockbuster Video, which came next. People wanted to watch the latest movies available on video, and the Mom and Pop store couldn't deliver this very well. There were waiting lists, much longer than anything you might encounter with NetFlix. Blockbuster solved this problem by ordering dozens of copies of new releases, as many as the traffic would demand.
NetFlix's current business model, with monthly subscription fees, unlimited rentals, and no late fees, dates back only to 2000. It was seen as a vast improvement over Blockbuster or the various cut-rate operations one might have found in grocery or convenience stores, none of which offered the sort of full-service the now-defunct Mom and Pop store provided.
So this is why Richard Corliss thinks NetFlix is of the Devil.
- You can't get what you want instantly, right this minute while you're still craving it, which is, according to him, an American birthright.
So what? You put your disk into the mailbox and NetFlix often has it by the end of the day. You get your next disk two days later. How do they do this? The processing center is very close-by, thus shortening turnaround time considerably. W00t to the USPS (a government entity that seems to work so well, even conservatives take it for granted)! I live in rural Upstate New York, and our local processing center is in Syracuse, some 40 miles away. I suspect that is about as far as it gets for most people. I much prefer that to wasting a bunch of time and gas on repeated trips to the video store to see if that copy of Summer Blockbuster hadn't been re-rented yet.
- We've become a nation of couch-potatoes.
And this is a new thing? Corliss suffers from what I call New Yorker syndrome. Consider the famous 29 March 1976 cover of the New Yorker where the world is depicted from the perspective of a resident of Manhattan (from the Upper West Side at 9th Ave.), with everything that is not Manhattan being greatly diminished in significance. From reading this piece, one might think that he believes everyone lives within walking distance of a video store, or at least did before NetFlix destroyed the world.
The reality was, if one were to avoid late fees, one would have to get in the car and make a special trip to the video store the next day to turn in those videos before the deadline, usually noon the next day. This was relaxed somewhat, especially by Blockbuster, but the price went up, so you put up with the shorter turnaround time to save a few bucks. I would therefore suggest that NetFlix is way greener than the neighborhood video store, which even at it height was at least three miles from my house.
- Mom and Pop knew more about movies than Netflix's computer.
Maybe true, maybe not. See my Ph.D. comment from the first paragraph.
- Mom and Pop carried these movies you never heard of, and broadened your horizons as a result.
There is (almost) nothing on Earth that NetFlix doesn't have. This includes obscure independent films, obscure foreign films (both dubbed and with subtitles), and obscure 70s television shows that only lasted a season or two because the philistines back then preferred Three's Company.
- This one is just precious:
Getting movies by mail is, Netflix hopes, just a stage between the Blockbuster era of video stores and the imminent streaming of movies. You can already get 12,000 Netflix titles on your TV (if you have a Blu-ray player or spring for a $100 Netflix box). So, O.K., soon there will be no more waiting for DVDs. But it'll come at a price. You'll be what the online corporate culture wants you to be: a passive, inert receptacle for its products.
Dude, that's television. We were passive, inert receptacles (who liked Three's Company) already, generations before the advent of home video. I have about 90 titles in my streaming queue. I pick and choose what goes there. I rate what I've just watched. I cancel stuff that I think sucks. I hardly call that passive.
So while I agree with those who suggest that not everything new and exciting constitutes progress, I also recognize that there is perhaps 10 percent of the "new" (for example, the iPod) that actually is progress and should be celebrated as such.
UPDATE: You all asked for a poll, so here it is. I hope I got it right.