A friend of mine said he once saw an article stating that if you are a "heavy" user of Netflix (someone who quickly turns over DVDs and uses many per month), they give you a lower priority on your queues and ship things slower.

Anyone know if this is true?

I have not heard that. However, if he is seeing different mail times it may be a result of his method. I seen a day difference if the following occurs:

A) I drop it off at the post office late afternoon.

B) I drop it off at home or in a mail box.

Usually if I drop it off directly at the post office early in the day I will have a new disc at my door in two more days.

Problem with A is it probably misses some junction deadline. Problem with B is ...well I really have no idea. I suppose B ends up meeting A and A's problem rises again.

This doesn't happen to me personally since I have a distro center 10 miles away (although I'm getting concerned that I haven't received an email notice announcing the last two discs arrived from being mailed last Saturday....) but I will say that I'm a member of another...more risque' type service similar to Netflix that definitely, purposely slows the receive/ship process down and it's somewhat frustrating.

But hey, for $9.95 a month, who cares?

I think I may have found it:

http://dvd-rent-test.dreamhost.com/

Could you either e-mail or post what the service is? I'd like to use that.

Thanks

I tend to use it heavily and get six discs a week. Most of the time they work brilliantly. Other times (usually if there's a holiday) they'll piss me off with bad service. Once I sent out three discs but it took them a rather long time to receive them. Recently, I sent out three discs on a Saturday and didn't get new ones for an entire week! Maybe it's the mail, but I know I'm not too happy when it happens.

As I usually have older catalog titles in my queue I usually don't have any problem getting the ones I want, and even so they're good about getting them to me on the new selections as well. At one time i thought they were doing the slow business with me but after switching my home base to a closer shipping location its been very smooth.My turnaround is about 6 days.

Yeah, from the article, it looks to be only an issue for the "hot" new releases.

I'm a pretty heavy user and am now on my third month, and I've not had any trouble getting new releases.

There are times, though, when Netflix does seem to slow my shipments down a day. For example, they received all the discs I had out (8 of them) on Tuesday. Instead of shipping new ones Tuesday, they didn't ship any until Wednesday (even though I had had some of the discs over a week. It was actually one of my slower turnarounds). If I stagger the return time so they don't get all eight on one day, they almost always ship out a disc the same day they receive one.

Yes, it's true.

True for me too. After two months of heavy use (i.e. watch and return the discs the next or the following day) on a 3 DVD plan, I noticed they would CONSISTENTLY take an extra day to show a DVD as received and they would CONSISTENTLY ship a day later than represented in my queue, thereby adding two days to the cycle I enjoyed as a new member. They even started shipping DVDs out one at a time, on successive days, even when I had returned all three on the same day. This was true for both "hot" releases and for older "catalog" titles.

This summer, I went on vacation for two weeks and my brother visited me for the following two weeks so I didn't return many DVDs for about a month. I suddenly began getting faster response times from them but this only lasted for maybe a month before returning to the slower cycle I "enjoyed" before vacation.

Oh well, at least they were forced to reduce my monthly fee by $4. The service is still easily worth $18 (or even $23) a month to me.

Its very true.

For people who are slow to return movies they will ship your next movie out very early in the morning. For the people who are heavy users like myself they wait until around 4pm to ship them to you. And sometimes wait a extra day to ship a couple of them. These bastards piss me off. You would think for 50 a month I would get some good service. All I rent is old movies.

But why would they do this? It would make sense to send them to the quick user immediately so they can get the film back quicker. Makes no sense.

I am not a heavy user but I send some back the next days & some back after a few days. I have never had a problem with shipping.

I always figured that if a title is slower in shipping, it had to be located and mailed from a spot in the country no where near me. They don't have every movie in their collection at every hub.

I can confirm that Netflix drags their feet shipping discs to heavy users. They get my discs the morning after I mail them but the discs are consistantly taking between 5-6 days (and in a growing number of instances, over a week) to return to me. When I started my membership, the discs all arrived the next day after they listed shipping them. This went on for many months. For well over a year now not a single DVD has arrived the next day. Anymore, I feel it's a screwup when I see a disc in my mailbox just two days later... or it's because Netflix occasionally asks me to tell them when a particular disc arrives (in the interest of quality control) and those are the discs that *always* arrive in two days, not seven.

they have done this with me, and have heard of many other heavy users who have experienced the same - by slowing things down they save themselves money...less postage

Shipping costs

The slower they ship, the less discs they have to pay to mail.

My turn around time is 2 days longer then it used to be.

D'oh. That completely slipped my mind.

Also, the fewer films you get, the more money they are making off of you. They would far prefer to ship 2 or 3 DVDs a month for $17.99 than 15 to 20.

I have noticed the same lately. They always take an extra day to acknowledge a returned disc. Just a month ago they always shipped a new disc the same day they got a return but now they always take an extra day to ship it.

And in the interest of 'fairness', at least with hot releases. If you watch 30 a month, and i watch 5 a month, I should have a better chance of getting a hot release than you.
And yes, the more they send you, the less the profit, etc.
And sometimes it just gets stuck in the mail.
I'm a low-volume user, so I don't have much problem with getting what I want when I want it; I dropped something in my mailbox Monday, and got its replacement Thursday.

I also have noticed their 'Recieved' or 'Shipped' emails are delayed, but that's not a big deal, I check my queue every day or so anyway, and especially when I am expecting them to send a new one.

I have been waiting for Jersey Girl since it was released (about 2 months now I think). It has actually been in my queue for months, and still I see LONG WAIT.

Same here. I figured it will already be on cable by the time it arrived so I just canceled it....Along with Eternal Sunshine.

It doesn't bother me if, when demand for a specific disc exceeds supply, the light users get priority over the heavier users.

The problem for me is the sneaky tactics they won't admit to that slows down heavier users even for discs where demand doesn't outstrip supply, especially since these tactics are apparently not universally applied (and it does work against the idea that the service is "unlimited" when they put unadvertised limits on it).

I wouldn't be surprised to see a class-action lawsuit at some point due to some of these practices that are designed to slow down some users.

I agree with you that the service is NOT "unlimited". It appears to me to be covertly limited. I have the three out plan and I used to get three dvds per week. Then competition forced the announced price reduction. At first the new rates announced $17.99 - 10 dvd per month. When that drew negative reaction they quickly changed it back to "unlimited". Oddly enough, the shipment rate has slowed enough so that I no longer get 3 per week (12 per month). I now get 3 every 10 days or about 9-10 per month. Oddly, that was the limit they first announced. Imagine my surprise.

Thank god I'm not the only one getting screwed. Unfortunately, the competitors' offers aren't as good as Netflix or else I'd drop them in a second.

It almost makes me feel like returning all my movies the same day without watching them for a whole month just to rack up extra shipping charges on these guys.

Oh well, I guess I'll just keep bending over for now.