Netflix, blockbuster, and Bluray

Why is it that all of the online video rental places are doing the normal competition thing in reverse? Instead of competing with each other to add new features, they’re competing in how many they can take away!

Back when I signed up for blockbuster (Primarily because they had Bluray,) they allowed you to get unlimited rentals in the store by trading in videos in envelopes. Unfortunately they first dropped this down to 5 in-store rentals per month, then started charging extra even for those 5! When they did that, along with slowing down the shipment of new DVDs, I reduced my account to a 2 per month $4 account and moved my entire queue short of a handful to Netflix. After all, Netflix had competitive prices and also had Bluray discs, and had more discs in stock…

Now a month or two ago, Netflix adds a $1 surcharge to Bluray rentals for your account. I went along with it, $1 isn’t too much… But now they pushed this up to a *$5* charge per month. The first bluray disc in my queue was 90 places down! It simply wasn’t worth $5 to get bluray discs in the distant future…

So now I put $5 extra into my blockbuster account and moved all my Bluray movies back to blockbuster… That way I’ll actually GET bluray discs for my extra funds…