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Comment by bko | Hacker News Reader

I was wondering if there is a DVD service similar to Netflix when it first came out. And of course there is, but pricing seems high!

DVD Inbox and Cafe DVD is $20/mo for 2 discs at a time, with unlimited discs and a 5 day guarantee. 5 days to get your DVD doesn't seem great. They have cheaper plans but limit the number of DVDs you can take out.

Netflix was revolutionary because they shipped very eagerly and they charge $15/mo for 2 DVDs unlimited. And I think their shipping took 2 days. They shipped as soon as you shipped yours back so if you were diligent you could prob have close to a movie every night. Incredible service.

I guess the economics just isn't there.

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https://scarecrowvideo.org/ has thousands of videos you could never get on netflix.

Came here to say this! It’s the largest public video collection I’m aware of, at over 150,000 titles. Also they rent by mail. Not cheap but when you really need that movie…

In Berlin we’d just go to the local movie rental shop (think Blockbuster). Wednesdays they would rent the latest Blu-Ray titles for 1.50€, 1€ for DVDs. Done and dusted, the service was amazing and we’d talk a bit with the lady there. I really miss that shop.

Now we use the library or buy cheap DVDs second-hand at a shop that employs people that would struggle to be hired. We cancelled our Netflix when it became something like 15€ per month. That’s 3 years of library subscription.

> And I think their shipping took 2 days.

Their shipping was pretty incredible. I'd drop one off early morning pickup at my college campus and have another DVD the next day aternoon in my mailbox sometimes. It was crazy how fast I could turn over discs.

I use store-3d-blurayrental.com. They do more than 3d. It's expensive, compared to streaming, but the quality of 4k bluray can't be beat. I have a 120" screen. You notice the difference between 1080p or even high and low bitrates at that size. I think physical media might make a bit of a comeback as screen sizes increase unless streaming services up their bitrates.

> I think physical media might make a bit of a comeback as screen sizes increase unless streaming services up their bitrates.

The latter sure seems a lot more likely than the former, my man.

You would think so, but the prices keep going up and the bitrate keeps going down. Some of that is up to codec and encoding improvements, but I think a lot of it is just that they know they can get away with it.

If you'd have asked me 20 years to bet on whether streaming or shiny disks would be producing better quality audio/video in 20 years my money would NOT have been on disks but here we are. Ye Olden Plastic Disk's are still kicking streaming's butt even though I have 2.5Gbps fiber now.

Prices keep going up and bitrates down because most streaming services (except for Netflix and YouTube) have been basically break-even or money losing for years now, and the appetite for that is cooling.

Also, display resolution is not scaling like it used to. The move up from 4k to 8k is far more expensive and less worthwhile than the previous jumps.

So, I think your assumptions about the business side of streaming and the way the hardware is scaling are wrong and we will, in fact, not see physical media make a comeback.

You're probably right, sadly. The best case we could reasonably expect would be better quality streams, but I don't seriously believe that will happen either.

There are some niche services like the one that you can only get on Sony TV's that stream at like 50% of UHD bluray's bitrate - and that might be as good as it gets for the foreseeable future unless these services are forced to compete on quality or people decide to care about 8k or something.

There's one in the UK too, Cinema Paradiso. The prices are also quite high.

Also, the turnaround times were really slow. Slow mail perhaps, but at the same time it's kind of in their interests to not turn things around so fast.

In the UK, letters get a lower priority than packages which doesn't help.

The economics for the company aren't great for people that make high frequency use of it. And I suspect that people that would pay for such a service nowadays would make good use of it.

Regarding the 5d guarantee -- I suspect that most disks would show up in 2-3 days, but if you're going to guarantee you'll need some buffer (as I think US Mail says first class is 1-5 days). And I think Netflix was just counting on it mostly being shorter (and may have even had distribution centers at some point in its history).

> DVD Inbox and Cafe DVD is $20/mo for 2 discs at a time, with unlimited discs and a 5 day guarantee.

This is about what we paid for Netflix in 2006. Especially after accounting for inflation.

> I think their shipping took 2 days

Yeah, it was fast. And yet, for it to work financially, they were still using plain old USPS. The trick (which required the levels of volume they had at the time) was to have a bunch of distribution centers positioned all throughout their service area. For a modern day service trying to do the same with significantly less volume, they won't be able to afford the extra distribution centers.

They also had an agreement with the post office to register the disk as returned the moment USPS scanned it.

We also (I worked there at the time) had software that basically said, "Joe watches all of his disks every weekend and drops them in the mail on Tuesdays, let's just assume he's going to do that and ship his new disks Monday morning". And other such predictions.

If you had a very regular viewing behavior you could have your new disks the same day as you shipped your old ones. To the customer, it was magical.

$15 back in 2006 is $25 today

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