>What's wrong with Netflix?
Someone here posted a link to some interesting video, and when trying to watch it, I was greeted with Netflix ad, which is IMO rude and merits three months of non-shopping from whoever does that, period. Any ads in sequential media (i.e. those that you can't skip) are reason enough for me to just vote with my feet.
>Blockbuster was waaaayyyy behind on the DVD curve and now that I have an HDDVD player, along with a couple hundred thousand other new HD player owners during the sale, they have announced that they will become Bluray only.
Yeah, I did a foolish thing and bought a DVD player (for my PC) back in 1999, when the number of rentable titles was about a dozen (5 in the local grocery's video rental, 7 in BBuster). I switched to the latter when I discovered that the former has sold my address to everybody and their aunt (*), but the latter lost me when I discovered that the deal they sold me would save me some money only if I was renting at least three titles a week. Since about 99% of their warez was fresh Hollywood manure, I just let that silently expire and never went there again. Switched to Hollywood video, which then lost me when they tried to wrongly charge me with overdue dues - I don't care that the kid who picks the tapes from the box on the curb was late for work that day, I'm not paying this and I'm not returning either. Unless you double your assortment of foreign movies from 50 to, say, 200 and refresh it at least annually. Generally, once upon a time I imagined video rentals would be like libraries - they'd keep books from ages ago that you can't buy anymore. But they actually don't have anything that's older than a couple of years, unless it's a cult classic or a foreign movie.
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(*) only one of those who bought my address from Kroger Video got me as a customer - the sfbc.com. But they are just as bad as any other book club; they try to send you "editor's pick" that you have to catch and send back on time or else you owe them for it. OK, they stopped that in 2004. I actually was almost satisfied with them recently: their latest catalog is (finally!) neatly divided into SF and The Rest sections, so I don't have to read the blurbs and scan for keywords (sword, dragon, orc, vampire, lord of, empire, wizard and not too many more). They even got a few fresh titles when I expected them, and even a couple of surprises. Plus, the last deal was quite good. But then I got spam from them ("The Science Fiction Book Club"
) offering to "Transfer your high-rate balances now", courtesy of one "Fair Isaac Corporation".
I've tolerated other spam they sent me so far, because it was all book related so far, even though it was anything but SF. But this crosses the line - SFBC is selling email addresses to banks! I've waited my last check to them to clear, and now I'm going to cancel my membership.
