Boot

Surely everyone who has experience with Netflix has noticed it on this site. It lists all the services available and ends with "...and no throttling!"

I wish they were a little bigger and could actually put a dent in Netflix's stranglehold on the dvd rental market. Still, maybe Netflix is paying attention. Nah, probably not.

mbs

According to friends I have in this area, they do throttle the local customers (Bay Area heavy users). With the rest of the country, the several days in transit slow things down (think 4+ days of transit time from and to the east coast for each movie). But when living around SFO, they do (according to my sources) routinely delay shipments a day or two.

I'm sure they have no interest in more distribution centers. That would only mean quicker turnarounds and more shipping costs.

rich-y

I loved Greencine when I was with them due to the large choice of obscure and hard-to-find titles. The only reason I switched back to Netflix is because of the extremely long shipping times. When I returned movies, it took about 3 days to get from Cincinnati to California (and the same amount of time for my next choice to arrive in my mailbox). That's 6 days between movies compared to 3 (total) with Netlix.

Boot

While that's certainly not ideal, since August, it's taken three to four days for my movies to reach the Netflix center 100 miles away. I send out Monday; they don't scan them as received until Thursday, sometimes Friday.

Deke Rivers

Greencine had a great selection..that was about it..took forever to get stuff nd when I did 90 percent of the dvds were unplayable because they were so dirty or damaged..

underdog8

Hey there,
Full disclosure: I work for GreenCine, and thus I'm incredibly biased. ;-) But just to address this - we absolutely do not throttle. It's possible (given the USPS, likely) that your friends have experienced delays from time to time in receiving shipments, but we never purposely delay sending out discs after we receive discs. i.e., when we get someone's discs in house we send them the next available discs in their queue that same day. Always. The only exceptions to this are if someone locked their entire queue because they only want to receive the first title in their queue and nothing else until that is available, or if they only have a couple of items in their queue and neither are available that day. Otherwise, if someone hasn't locked their queue, then we ship same day (including Saturdays), always. Just wanted to say something because I know people are naturally, understandably suspicious of any company nowadays, but we wouldn't put that "no throttling" thing on the ad if we couldn't back it up.

(PS to the above poster: We now use protective cardboard mailers with all our discs and have seen a dramatic decrease in damaged discs. We also have a disc cleaner and try to clean them when we can. You can always alert cust support if you have any problems.)

Meanwhile, you can always try our new dvd sales service, which we just launched this week. Or you can download a movie. Or you can just pop on by and say hello.

Okay, end of insider info/soap box, now. Hope this helped.

How about that Crash, huh? Sure was sort of overrated eh?

Craig P
aka underdog on GreenCine

mbs

Well, that sounds promising. Thanks for posting. Since I live in the area, I've been meaning to sign up and test it out for myself. Maybe this is the time to do so.

bluesix

Ive used Greencine in the past and I live in LA. I was able to average about a movie every 10 days with them. The turnaround is annoying but realistic considering the usual mail service from SF to LA. Never had any problem with dirty or damaged disks. The download stuff looked cool but since the quality was inferior I didnt bother. I want stuff I can watch on my 50" plasma not on my computer monitor! At least someone is trying this idea out but its definitely not ready for the masses.

Since I have a Netflix account for the mainstream stuff I rent I primarily used GreenCine for the obscure crap that even Netflix doesnt carry and Blockbuster never even considered. That and porn. Thats the dirtly little secret about GreenCine. In fact I think they have more porn titles than commercial films.

Unfortunately, now that I've seen all the porn and obscure movies I was interested in I've stopped service with them. It just isn't competitive enough with Netflix. Sure it's a dollar or two less a month but when you only end upwith 3 to 4 rentals a month, its just not as good a value.

Their wait times can sometimes seem to be WAY too long also but mainly for porn titles. I can't imagine how long it would have taken with a new release of a big commercial movie since I never even bothered trying. I sometimes wondered if they only had one disk to send out???

I wish GreenCine could get a cash infusion and expand their distribution center and shorten that turnaround time. And buy more copies of disks!

Lord know I would prefer to support the underdog company and help keep capitalism alive but not with those tradeoffs. I seriously can't see GreenCine being useful to anyone outside of Northern Cali or unless they had something against Netflix. When some enterprising young turk opens an LA version of GreenCine they will definitely get my business.

Sorry GreenCine!

Craig P: Just noticed your post on being an 'insider'. Can you shed some light on this? Does GreenCine have a distribution center outside of NoCal? If not, how do they seriously think they can compete with Netflix? Also, I don't believe I was throttled but seriously, does GreenCine carry more than one copy of each movie they offer?

underdog8

Hey there - sorry, just saw your post.

First, we're not competing with Netflix - not in the terms some people think of. We don't care to be that big, we don't want to overexpand, and lose our flavor, our scale, our personality, our customer service, etc. I guess one difference between us and NF is that we really do care whether a customer stays or leaves - whereas NF could literally care less if you leave them because they'll fill in the gap with someone else, who will remain until they become bitter with throttling or lack of service.

Also, we do carry many copies of lots of movies - the most popular ones, we buy more of, the less popular ones, we buy less of. (Adult films are harder to supply but we try to keep that section well stocked too, and then fill in the gaps with on-demand choices and so on.) There is a method to our madness, too, though as we try to push people to many other films that they may not have heard of. We want to lead people a little bit and people seem to like that. Not that we're not a work in progress, of course, because we are. The sales of new DVDs is just part of that - and makes us the only place doing the "trifecta" of movie distribution (if you include on-demand, too). New DVDs are indeed distributed through 5 distrib. centers nationwide, but via our drop-ship partner (and it's really fast, too, I can attest to that as one who ordered through it myself). DVD rentals can't be distributed through this method, alas, or we would certainly use it. We haven't ruled out opening more rental distrib. centers at some point, but it's an expensive proposition.

Given the NF's CEO's recent boast that he wants to close every mom and pop bricks and mortar video store in the country, you can imagine how he feels about us.

Meanwhile, we want to emphasize our people, our editorial focus, our dissemination of independent films, classic, art house, international, documentary, with working with independent studios, with sponsoring screenings, with really pushing our emphasis that movies matter. Overexpand and we die. We've outlasted a lot of our other mid-level competitors who learned this a little too late. Again, please understand that there is a method to our madness, and then it's of course completely up to you as to what you're looking for.

Hope this answers some questions - there are some inner workings secrets that I can't divulge or I'll be slapped upside the head. ;-) But it's a start anyway, ja?

All the best,
Craig (a.k.a., underdog on GreenCine, appropriately enough)

chemosh6969

The one that came out recently or the good one starring the sister from The Wonder Years?

Matt925

I've used greencine for 3 1/2 years and I can absolutely attest to the fact that they don't throttle. One day each way for me. If I lived on the other side of the country I probably wouldn't use them, but any delays people experience aren't their fault. I've been very satisfied so far (would be nice if they had more copies of the movies, but you have to be realistic).