Peerflix slogan of: trade DVDS, don’t rent them, sounds dicey in this MPAA crackdown day and age, until you actually read the details of what the site is about. They are not an illegal P2P filetrading network, but a person-to-person DVD by mail service. Peerflix is in beta, which is where too many services seem to stay these days. The days of not reviewing beta products, I guess, have passed by. A reviewer at Wired points out some downsides to the service:

A Netflix-like system for trading your unwanted DVDs with others through the mail sounds like a cool idea. But in practice, you wind up with a stack of old discs that no one will take off your hands. That’s been my experience with Peerflix, an online movie-swapping service that applies the principles of peer-to-peer file-sharing to physical DVDs.

The Peerflix blog answers the Wired reviewer’s objection:

Recently, a review in Wired magazine highlighted some common and other not-so-common problems. Specifically, the reviewer faced problems moving some of her older movie collection quickly within the network, and going through the Peerbux purchase process. We are disappointed, of course, to hear that our DVD trading solution did not meet her overall needs. But where else can one get rid of an unwanted Rocky Horror Show and catch Renee Zellweger in Down With Love for only $0.99? For us, the glass is half full, not half empty.

Like the positive attitude there, plus the fact that the company has a blog. Their blog doesn’t have comments enabled, but it does have trackbacks, so I’ll send this message through. I bookmarked Peerflix and intend to return later and be my own judge of the service. Being a new subscriber to Netflix the whole DVD-by-mail scene is currently on my radar. The “flix” part in the name is clearly paying homage to Netflix.

Any other MakeYouGoHmm readers ever try out this service?

On Monday Dave Winer was wondering about Netflix and dating / matchmaking being mixed:

I wonder if Netflix has ever thought of partnering with Match.com to connect people who like the same kind of movies?

The movie site, Cinematical, wrote about the exchange and then one of their readers named Josh commented that such a place already existed: MatchFlick:

MatchFlick works to connect people through that appreciation of the big screen and offers a place where these movie-goers can meet, communicate, and go to the theater with each other.

Not really a DVD by mail service like Netflix or a full blown dating service like match.com, but it does mix the two together as Dave had pondered. I wonder how many Star Wars III hookups there were?

With the man in question at age 91 one of the greatest journalistic mysteries of the last 30 years has finally been solved. Writes the Washington Post:

In a statement today, Woodward and Bernstein said, “W. Mark Felt was ‘Deep Throat’ and helped us immeasurably in our Watergate coverage.

The original agreement was that the true identity would not be revealed until after his death, but with Felt’s health fading and his admittance to Vanity Fair that he was the One, Woodward and Bernstein stepped up and confirmed. Something tells me a movie will be made about this exploring Felt’s life and involvement in exposing the Watergate scandal.

The ./ crowd does not seem to envy the prospect of an eleventh Star Trek film, but they may not have their wishes granted.

… according to Trek head honcho Rick Berman, a new film might come sooner than you think: ‘If it gets done in two years or three years I think that timeframe for a new, fresh feature with a whole different outlook would be fine.’

Nemesis was so good (sarcasm) that Activision sued. Somewhere Gene Roddenberry is rolling over in his grave.

Meanwhile, many others remain stoked about the theater release later this year of Josh Whedon’s Firefly, whose TV series of the same name was cancelled too soon. Good series that wasn’t given enough wings to fly.

A 42% drop for Star Wars III Revenge of the Sith might seem bad, but actually that’s better than the normal dropoff of 50-60%.

Sith remained No. 1 over the four-day weekend with $70.8 million, according to estimates from Nielsen EDI. It already has taken in $271.2 million.

Madagascar and The Longest Yard both did $61 and $60 million respectively. The latter I thought about going to see and the former looks like something we’d catch on DVD.

I might be wrong here, but I believe internationally Sith is already over $450 million. Not bad at all.

The headline “Oliver Stoned” in Google sucked me in. Here’s the list to read more takes on essentially the same story told repeatedly by dozens of different media outlets.

Well, now add one from the blogosphere.

Academy Award winning directory Oliver Stone was stopped Friday night and arrested over suspicion of DUI and drug possession. In 1999, he pled no contest to DUI and guilty to a drug-possession charge. Writes zap2it:

Beverly Hills police are not disclosing what type of drug Stone was allegedly carrying, saying they have to wait for the results of test on the substance.

Stone directed one of my favorite movies: JFK. He won an award for Platoon in 1986. He’s also responsible for some godawful flicks like Alexander. Could this be why he’s out allegedly getting all lit up?

Maybe the judge will direct Oliver Stone to the nearest treatment center — again — and perhaps next time his favorite bartender will direct him to a designated driver? Good thing nobody got hurt. Nice work, Beverly Hills police for directing Stone to the hole.

Stone posted $15,000 bail and is out.

Hacking Netflix ponders the Netflix & Walmart deal:

I know some people really dislike Walmart for a variety of reasons, but do you dislike them enough to quit? Do you think this will help Netflix? Will it hurt their ability to work with Amazon? Will Walmart buy Netflix?

Quite a few Wal-mart haters in that thread. I’m not a huge Wal-Mart fan either. The stores are big and feel kind of cold to me. Much prefer the local Fred Meyer for both groceries and some other miscellaneous type purchases. I like Best Buy when it comes to retail electronics purchases. Both Fred Meyer and Best Buy have rewards clubs, not sure if Wal-Mart has such an animal (doubt it).

I’ve checked out the Netflix rental price structure several times over the years. Currently 1 DVD at a time with no limit will cost you $9.99 a month. 2 DVDs at a time with no monthly limit is $14.99/month. There are some 40,000 titles in their database.

Doing the math
Let’s say our family wanted to see 10% of the movies in the Netflix database. That brings the 40,000 down to 4,000. How many of these 4,000 DVDs do we already own? My guess is about 10% of that number (400) so that leaves a pool of 3,600 DVDs to rent from.

If our family setup a queue with Netflix and rented say 4 cycles a month of 2 DVDs at a time, that would be 8 DVD rentals a month divided by $14.99. That works out to $1.84 per rental of DVD, not counting the neglible time to drop these off at the post office. We don’t get mail delivered to our home or business on main street. That gives probably 2-3 days of the 7 days each week to watch two movies I haven’t seen.

3600 / 8 = 450 weeks to see all the movies Netflix has in their existing library that I might want to see using 10% ratio of their library. In other words, it wouldn’t happen any time soon. This also doesn’t count new movies that are coming out or an increase in the Netflix inventory.

The reality is that I’m pretty certain we wouldn’t keep up a steady trend of 2 movies a week, so that throws these numbers out the window. We might do that for a couple months, but then I think I’d get tired of the process and a couple rentals a month would end up costing me $14.99 or $17.99 a month.

This is why I’d much rather be able to do this on-demand and skip the whole snail mail routine. Even if it’s 2-3 days (1 business day, they claim) to swap out the movies.

Then again, we’ve never actually tried this out, so maybe I need to quit over-analyzing this and just give the service a one or two month trial to see how it really goes.

Ok, we did just that.

Trying it out
Last Sunday, 5/22/05, at around 6:30pm PST we signed up for the $17.99 plan: three movies at a time. As a family we cycled through the movies and created a queue of over 50 movies. On Monday we received email that our movies would be arriving on or around Wednesday. On Tuesday 5/24/2005 all three showed up. It took us all week to watch two of the three movies, and we only half-watched the third. We plan to have that watched (The Incredibles) and put the other two movies back in the mail on Tuesday 5/31 after the Memorial Day holiday.

My thoughts so far? An average of three DVDs a week will mean that we are paying about $1.49 per movie rental which isn’t too bad. We have to dilligently remember to send back the movies at least once per week, which is something I think we might have a problem doing. I noticed from the mail stamp that the movies are coming from Tacoma which is very close, so I’m curious if the turnaround will continue to be 2-3 business days.

It’s too early to rate the service overall with only one shipment, but we’re going to keep it beyond the free 14 day trial.

… if Harrison Ford approves the script, that is. Lucas and Spielberg are already down for another sequel. Nice contextual advertising below, pun intended.

Is it just me or could this be an early casting call for support-ing actors? Rim shot. Ok, lame joke. But just think for a moment of all the cool breast-related titles an Indiana Jones sequel could bear: Temple of VaVoom. Raiders of the Bare Cleavage. Indy! Indy!

If this becomes a practical reality and takes off, the this may very well breathe new life into the paper shredder industry. Watch out, Paper Mario!

According to Sony, researchers were able to make a paper disc as Blu-ray technology does not require laser light to travel through a key layer of a disc called the substrate. The paper discs are also expected to be cheaper to produce than current DVDs.

Imagine the latest Dean Koontz novel weighing more than your entire DVD collection? Just don’t let the kids spill the milk on the paper copy of Star Wars III. Yeah, they said practical uses and purchased media like DVDs not very likely. I’m waiting on the holographic credit card sized storage, wonder how far down the pipeline that is in coming?

Yahoo has launched a new service today for providing movie recommendations. Upon visiting that URL you’ll be asked for your Yahoo login.

Movie recommendations from Yahoo! movies provides personalized recommendations for both current and past films playing in theaters, on TV or on DVD/video. It’s easy to use—simply enter your age range and gender (this is optional, but can help focus the recommendations you receive), indicate whether you lean more toward Hollywood-type or independent films, and rate a few movies that you’ve already seen.

I rated a few movies just to see what it threw back at me. Firstly, I like the smooth looking colorful rating popup. It will produce movies for you to quickly rate and then submit in blocks of six movies at a time. For some reason in Internet Explorer it wouldn’t record my votes (doh!), so I switched over to Firefox which wouldn’t even popup the submit box. But wait, that’s only one machine, so I’ll try another …

On the second computer (my M1400 Tablet PC) when I logged in it showed that I had indeed rated three of the six movies (correct). I decided to check out what these three ratings would tell it about whether I’d like Star Wars III (which I already had reviewed). The critics overall rated it B+ and Yahoo users were a bit more positive with an A-. Me? Still a B:

I surfed around a bit more and added some more ratings. Noticed a lot of high marks from Yahoo users as opposed to critics, which I suppose is a given, but still, can the critics always be that cynical? I found one movie that Yahoo users were actually lower than the critics.

All seemed to work fine on the Tablet PC. I didn’t demo this in Safari on the Mac. I went to ratings to see what it turned up for suggestions: Kicking & Screaming (yes), The Longest Yard (saw it awhile back, but would like to see the new version, yes), Crash (looks worth seeing, yes), Unleashed (ok), Madagascar (the kids would like that, yes). Solid picks, I’d say. Reminded me of the TiVO suggest function which I’ve missed since dropping TiVO.

It also gave me some TV suggestions (Shrek 2, The Quiet Man, Swordfish, Men in Black and The Last Samuri). Not bad, though I’ve seen MIB already.