In June of 2005 I looked at Peerflix, the DVD sharing and rental service who’s competition is Netflix and Blockbuster. One reader, Tom, commented that his son thought their service was “great.” The concept of trading DVDs didn’t seem very sound to me then, and still doesn’t, but Peerflix has surived the first year and actually have grown rather impressively.

The Silicon Beat reports:

…A year later, McNair says he has 150,000 registered users, and 250,00 DVDs have been added to the network. The 250,000 DVDs is an especially important number because without a large number and wide variety of movies to trade, users won’t find the service attractive, especially compared to a Netflix or Blockbuster. The company also took another $8 million in funding …

I didn’t sign up and actually try Peerflix, so take my comments about this service with a grain of salt, however I do note that one of my criticisms was their blog didn’t allow any comments/trackbacks and now I see they accept both. That’s good to see.

They recently formed a partnership with Cinecast which they say is one of the leading “film pod casts on the web.” I’m somewhat skeptical by their misuse of the word podcast (no space), but kudos to them on the partnership.

I still think the ultimate DVD rental club will be one that is completely internet download based — ditching the whole overly expensive and time consuming snail mail reliance — and allows liberal sharing of movies across devices, a la Slingbox. If it can only be played on the PC that’s too limited for widespread adoption IMO, it needs to make it easy to watch it on the TV in the living room, at the summer cottage, from a motel room through the PC, etc. Whomever figures out that system and of course does it legally, will make a big splash.

I also am all for getting rid of that stupid theater time delay window. Let the DVDs be released the day they’re released in the theater. Mark Cuban is experimenting with this and I hope it goes over well. If this becomes the standard then I fully realize theaters will be impacted but hey, that’s business, they need to make the theater experience more attractive if they want to stay in the game. Laziness and complacency do not fit any successful long term business model I’ve ever seen.

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