Kube

By the way, I think it's great that you guys are trying to use this website to perfect your website.

Just a few points.

1) Is there a good reason two disk titles count as two seperate movies? If you rent Gladiator you want to see the 2nd disk supplements right away. Same is true for Do the Right Thing etc.

2) I'm not a big fan of signing on to a web-site every time I go there.

3) I wish your selection of older titles was deeper. When I switched over from netflix I had to drop a lot of films in my que that weren't (yet?) available on rentmydvd.com. I'm looking forward to renting a Monte Hellman film called The Shooting. (for example)

Thanks again for trying to talk directly with your customers. I hope you don't get tired of answering all these questions!

BoBoish

I'm just thankful they offer the supplements...unlike Netflix.

Bo.

RMDInc

Hey, check it out! I learned how to use the Quote function.This is a simple matter of having a consistent inventory and a streamlined process for discs coming in and discs going out. If each disc, as an entity, has a unique ID and unique database entry then that disc will always be traceable. When two-disc sets are introduced as a single entity the problem mainly lies in keeping these two discs together and making sure that they always travel together. Sooner or later, no matter how well functioning our quality control measures are; only one disc of the two disc set will be in inventory. If it is not caught we will have angry customers. If it is caught it is now useless.

If all customers wanted to watch bonus materials along with features this may not be a problem, for the pair would have a greater likelihood of traveling together. Unfortunately, the majority of customers watch the feature and don't feel that the bonus is worth the effort and often forget or ignore the second disc. Because of this, if missed by the warehouse, we are back to either angry customers (on the next rental), useless single discs with no partners, or, more often, much lengthier delays while we contact customers and ask them to please return the second disc in a set. All in all, two disc sets are nightmarish for inventory and single discs assure our customers they will get exactly what they are ordering.

The Cookies, they are coming.

We, too, would love the depth and breadth of our library to be as comprehensive as possible, and it will be. The reality is that our library will grow with time (and suggestions!), but the DVD market is changing so fast it's hard to keep up. We can't just order a dozen of everything out there- maybe two years ago that would have been fine (even 6 months ago would have been fine- there were only about 9000 available titles) but now it's a mess with studios like Image Entertainment scheduled to release something like 2,000 titles this year alone. Some day when I have time on this forum I'll write "A Brief History of Home Video" as seen through my eyes, but for now I'll just say that the bulk of our inventory budget necessarily goes to new releases and the rest is spent on replacements, suggestions (like The Shooting), and obvious older titles. Basically, if you're patient they will come.

And Raytrade-
I like your methodology suggestions. We'll keep posting on this thread as best we can and occasionally look around for questions on others, but if any of you see Rentmydvd queries out there, try and send them to this thread so we can stay centered.

-Matt

leech

RMDInc, any plans on inducting indian DVD's ??? I know netflix has them ( i was their customer, until I found out you guys ). They are not expensive and I personally know a number of people who would be your customers if you had those ???

Greg Krewet

I joined last night and received an confirmation
that my card had been processed for the 2 at a time
membership plan and an a e mail would be forthcoming
that I would need to open up and validate my acount.
I am still waiting for that email approximately 8
hours later. Please advise.
Best
Greg

KyleB

Hi, I have just signed up & ordered two discs. Looking forward to trying things out! I have two comments:

1. Large number of Not Available items... above you said this indicates items that are not yet available on DVD? This is not entirely accurate, as I know of at least a couple things on your anime category that are definitely out on DVD, specifically Bubblgum Crisis vols. 1 to 3, and Sakura Diaries 1-3, as well as Amazing Nurse Nanako (which is on Not Available even though you do have #2 and #3!) Does this indicate that you plan to carry these in the future but don't yet, or what?

2. I don't know how feasible this is, but I thought I'd check out the Television category just to look through and see what you have. The first 2+ pages are devoted to Airwold DVDs (all of which are marked Not Available--see above) and so on. Maybe you could just list each series once, and then if you click on the series, you would then see individual discs/episodes of that series. It would make it a lot faster to look through the listing. However it would also probably be useful ONLY in browsing the TV category, which probably means it would be too difficult to implement. Still, a suggestion.

RMDInc

Mr. Krewet-

I know we spoke a couple of times today- let us know if you experience any further problems.
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KyleB-

The term "Not Available" has meant several different things since we began, mainly because we have changed our database structure several times. At the present time "Not Available" is used to describe two different DVD entities: those titles which are not available on the DVD format and those titles which are available on DVD that Rentmydvd does not presently carry. Roger's reference to N/A above was geared solely to the "Lexxx" stuff.

The TV idea is a good one. I'll put it in the suggestion box.

-----------------------------------------------------------

Leech-

I can say that we will eventually carry Indian titles, the only thing about it is that it's not worth doing if we don't stock a large and diverse inventory- at the present time we just don't have the ability to include such a library within our scope. It's sort of the same idea that I told Kube, but with metagenres (like the all-inclusive "Indian Titles") there's a whole other dimension involved. The amount of research and resources that goes into starting an endeavor of that sort would be just to much for us to handle right now. If we tried, not only would the result be not-so-great for the resultant Indian title library, the rest of inventory would suffer as well.
But keep your eyes open for it in the future.

------------------------------------------------------------

mdev

This is great! Signed up Wednesday night, my two movies shipped yesterday (Thursday), and I already have them. Only complaint that I have is that the two movies I was shipped arrived in the same packaging, meaning I have to return them both at the same time. Being that I'm signed up for two movies out at a time, when I send these two back, I'll probably get another two back in one package. This deprives me of the option of watching one, returning it, and then holding off on watching the other. Any plans on fixing it?

HepDude

This sounds like you don't really want to be in this business, you just ended up picking this randomly or for "historical reasons".

You see, when I tried to surf over to your website, Internet Explorer produced this error message: Frankly, there are already several online rental places where I can rent "Gladiator" but not anything esoteric.

I can choose from several sites that have small inventories, OR I can sign up for Netflix, and put everything that I've ever wanted to rent in my "queue" but never actually receive any of them.

Like, I could sell my car and have a dozen copies of the most popular DVDs for rent. Unless you have serious VC backing, all you are doing is the same thing on a larger scale.

BTW, you mention Indian DVDs as being too much to get involved with. But you also mention 9000 DVDs as a manageable number of inventory titles, and yet the biggest Indian DVD online rental site has 570 titles, the other two have 375 and 284 titles. Since you are not specifically an Indian site, getting the major titles would be nice - for example, the big blockbuster of 2000 comes to DVD in 10 days - "Mohabbatein" - that would be a good place to start.

leech

Ah, comon man, this is BS. I think people would be okay if you just had the DVD's. I don't think any one with a right mind would would expect you guys to support esoteric features like recommendations etc. I can certainly understand your concern, but no-one here is asking you for the kind of know-how you expect to have. I think just buying all the newer DVDs, dumping them into your inventory would be a good deal to start with. I don't even expect you guys to know the language of DVD, just drop them all as indian DVD's and it'll do.

jfoobar

Cut them some slack, leech. This is a company that is just ramping up operations after having spent millions in capital just to get rolling. By his use of the word "scope", he is probably referring to financial considerations as much as anything else. Just the cost of stocking a "decent" number of copies of films in what would comprise a "decent" catalog of Indian titles would be substantial indeed.

Looking at the traditional business model for rentals of foreign, region-centric titles, how many Blockbusters or Hollywoods do you see that have more than a smattering of Indian titles on VHS or DVD? Somewhere between "damn few" and "none" I suspect. The same is true for Vietnamese and Mandarin titles as well. These are typically handled by "ethnic" outlets. While the removal of the need for maintaining B&M outlets affords online rental entities the ability to carry a larger stock of titles, it doesn't give them carte blanche on maintaining inventory and yet still allow them the ability to make a profit.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, will be to try and convince them that it is financially in their best interest to spend that kind of money. I know I am not convinced that it is, and I won't have to pay the bills.

RMDInc

HepDude-

I am a little confused by your arguments.

This one confused me mainly because I didn't realize that the MS Corporation had to buy all the websites it displays.

BTW, is your stance:
or is your stance:
The simple fact is that what you seem to be calling esoteric titles and those that we have been refering to as Indian titles tend to amount to the same thing. Tell me: is there such a thing as a blockbuster esoteric title?
The bottom line is this: Let's say that we start with "Mohabbatein." Would any lover of Indian titles really even blink just because we have "Mahabbatein?" No. Because "Mohabbatein" is undoubtedly the "Gladiator" of Indian video specialty shops- online or otherwise. Would people like leech- people that really want us to carry Indian titles- be happy if we started carrying "Mahabbatein." No. leech would be about as happy as you seem to be because we carry "Drinking Games" and "Fusion One"- the IndieDVD independent label's most recent offerings, or "Asas de Portugal: Rolling in the Sky"- a documentary about Portugal's national acrobatic flying team, or our 100+ titles of Japanese Animation. We don't solely carry New Release A-Titles HepDude. Take a look around the site.

The only thing that I would like to make clear in this dialogue is that these things are coming; however, it really can't happen overnight. leech, I can appreciate your stance that just having the DVDs is enough and I only wish that were the case- it would make the data entry people quite happy. The simple fact is that we cannot operate that way, our database has to be as detailed as possible. Even with the precautions we already take we still make mistakes and it can be quite embarrasing.

JustinS has a point that is quite true: the idea of financial best interests. But understand that this idea only goes so far. It will be in our financial interests to build an Indian title offering to suit the large pool of people interested in Indian titles. This is true also for a dozen other metagenres. But to do so correctly- and this is true no matter which niche we're looking at- means offering a library- not a book.

Our Japanese animation is a fine example: we've gone about building the library rather haphazardly and have missed some things. Nevermind that we have 100+ titles, we get 10 e-mails a week telling us we need more. And we can appreciate that- but it's just not feasible to think that we can snap our fingers and magically appeal to every special movie-watching interest there is. One or two titles is fine- "WWII in Color" is easy to order and put in stock- it's not a genre. "Indian Films" is another matter entirely. So is "Hong Kong Cinema," "Erotica," "German Films," and anything else you can think of. If there is an interest, and if we decide it's a big enough interest, we will explore it and prepare for it and offer it in the future.



**********************************************************

es·o·ter·ic (eye-so-tar-ik)
adj.


1)
a. Intended for or understood by only a particular group: an esoteric cult. See Synonyms at mysterious.

b. Of or relating to that which is known by a restricted number of people.

2)
a. Confined to a small group: esoteric interests.

b. Not publicly disclosed; confidential.

****Above copied from dictionary.com****
***********************************************************

HepDude

Thanks for your reply. I really do appreciate your replies in this thread.

BTW, I have tried your service, and you shipped very promptly!

So far so good.

Now back to our discussion:

What I think is needed is to look at this from the viewpoint of a DVD renter.

I assume that you are looking for volume. The best way to do this is to get more customers and to get more of their DVD rental orders on a consistent basis.

From my viewpoint as a renter, I would like:

- to only have to go to one web site instead of five.

- to avoid the shipping charges that come from having 5 different orders instead of one or two.

- to avoid the problems that occur when I have to rent a DVD because it is available, rather than because I have the time to watch it. Only one site has even evidenced that they understand that people have this problem. This problem becomes greater when you have to rent from different sites, some of which don't have in-stock information on their sites - so one can't be sure when the DVD will arrive.

So, adding another site that has yet another subset of what I'd like to rent doesn't solve any of my rental problems.

However, the one thing that exists nowhere other than Netflix (which means that it exists nowhere, since Netflix didn't ship any DVDs in my queue while I had them), is the ability to rent Mohabbatein (or other Hindi DVDs) in the same order with my English language rentals - so I can avoid another $4-$5 shipping charge in order to see it.

In this one case, having less than all 600 DVDs is still a help - more so than adding 600 obscure DVDs.

BTW, I put little or no value on descriptions in a rental store database. If I'm going to spend $20 on a DVD, I expect those online purchasing stores to have descriptions, reviews, etc. Whereas if I'm going to spend ~$3 renting a DVD, the only critical information regarding that title is whether or not it is in stock (and any information that might distinguish it from other releases of the same film, of course, usually manufacturer and item number suffice). I can always go to Amazon or IMDB to see what the movie is about or what other people thought about it.

[Edited by HepDude on 03-05-01 at 05:10 PM]

Kube

Thanks for the response Matt. I can't say I agree with your company's policy about why you you don't count supplemental disks as one rental. However, I do understand your logic and hope that your staff comes up with a solution to track the disks.

Perhaps 2 disk titles can have a RED slip case with a big 2 on it. That way both the customers and your check in staff will easly see that 2 disks have been sent out.

I think you'll find without sending out both disks, many of the supplemental disks won't be watched at all.

Thanks for listening.

mdev

Hrm...I'm still waiting for a response on my question. I'm hoping you guys just didn't notice it rather than having ignored it.

RMDInc

mdev-

I'm sorry; it's always the easy questions that I tend to skim over- send customer service an e-mail with your full name and your request; we'll send you extra envelopes. While we encourage, for now, doing two at a time- we do allow one at a time.
---------------------------------------------------------

HepDude-

You make a strong case and I can see your point, so... Provided that one of our distributors carries the product and provided I can talk purchasing into it I'll see what I can do about "Mohabbatein" and maybe a handful of other Hindi titles. But, please, for now, I don't want to hear anything about our lack of selection. I'm not directing this at you, HepDude, I'm directing it at anyone reading this.
---------------------------------------------------------

Kube-

Good suggestion on the big red 2.
---------------------------------------------------------

More later..........

-Matt

jriems

First, I want to say thanks to Matt for his interaction so far. Believe me when I say that this simple gesture toward your customers goes a long way in cementing a lasting relationship -- something Netflix was never able to do satisfactorily, in my opinion, and one of the myriad reasons they lost me as a customer.

That said, I just have a couple suggestions:

1) I would very much like to see rentmydvd.com go the extra mile to offer different versions of the same title when there is a significant reason for doing so. Example: Dragonheart. It is available in a collectors edition without DTS, and a DTS version. Early on in my experience at Netflix, the two different versions were available, but somewhere along the line they dumped the DTS version. It is much appreciated if you can offer both versions when they are available.

2) Someone mentioned recently that they received an email from your customer service department stating you were working on a system that would allow customers to mark when their title(s) have been put in the mail allowing their next queued title(s) to get out in the mail quicker. I really think this is key, and would very much appreciate its implementation. When all is said and done, I want to squeeze in as many titles per month as I can, and this would allow at least a couple extra titles each month by trimming shipping time.

3) I would personally like to see some differentiation on the labeling of "not available" titles. In other words if it's not in stock have it read "out of stock," if it has not been released yet, but is coming, say something like "arriving soon." And if you are not able to get a certain title at all because it is discontinued, or you just can't land the copies, leave it out of the database, or label it "out of print" or something similar. This will help the customer better decipher the status of DVDs that are not in stock.

Keep up the good work, and please keep in mind all the things Netflix has done wrong in order to not make the same mistakes, please.

jriems

HepDude

First:

One big change you need to make - which all of the other rental stores already do - is to mark the "due date" on something in the package sent out.

Right now, I'm looking at the return envelope from an ethnic DVD rental site, and their return envelope has printed on it (by the printer) "Please mail by:______" and the shipping clerk has stamped with one of those date stamps (same as used by the library) "MAR 08 2001".

This lets me know exactly how long I have to view the DVDs.

In your case, I have to go back to some email to find that out.

It looks like you want to have things as automated as possible, so you could add that information to the address label that you print out with the bar code - my guess is that bar code is an order number, otherwise you would just print your address directly on the envelope.

So, simply add "Please Mail By MAR 08 2001" (or whatever) right above the barcode, and that should work. If your printers have color, you could put that in red.

PS A good starting point for Indian DVDs would be go to Indian DVD sites and add the dozen or so items they feature on the front page. Also good is IndianBlockBuster's Top 10 Selling DVDs, which is:

http://www.desirental.com/dvd/featur...param_type=T10

and currently includes:

Maine Pyar Kiya
Taal
Sholay (probably considered THE classic)
Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam
Kuch Kuch Hota Hai
Kaho Naa Pyaar Hai
Dil To Pagal Hai
Dil Se

and in the recent past has also included:

Hum Aapke Hain Koun (the most popular of recent films)
Saagar
Rangeela
Fiza

Some new releases I see mentioned on many sites:

Zubeidaa
Hum Saath Saath Hain (2 DVD Set)
Aashiq (2 DVD's)
Farz
Kuch Khatti Kuch Meethi
Don (release of classic on DVD)

sm8680

Indian DVD renters you fail to realize the significance and the cost benefit analysis of starting up Ethnic DVD's; its a significant and major undertaking and your only talking about Indian ethnicty. There are other ones as well. I would have hoped that the customer service agent from rentmydvd explanation would of been satisfactory. They just started up operations and I personally believe that you need to give them more time and give them some slack. They went after the mass market of renters and not smaller segmented pockets. Maybe in the future they will. But I'd hope that we could use this thread on other subject matters.

Personally I'd like to state the rentmydvd has been very customer friendly so far. That they appear to go out of their way to help the customer and hopefully this will result in an increased market share for them. I've had a few problems to date and each one was resolved expeditiously with a customer service agent.

Glennica

I've had bad experiences with NetFlix, so I'm very glad to see that they have some competition that values customer service.

I am impressed by RentMyDVD's willingness to participate in the forum. After seeing this thread, I visited their site for the first time.

I found two of the three rentals that I have been looking for - films that were rereleased as Special Editions, but I did not buy them because they are not anamorphic (or other discs in their box sets are not). Because they had been released previously, it's hard to find a place willling to stock the new editions.

You offer the SE's of The Doors and From Dusk Till Dawn. Thanks!

Is there any chance that you will be able to stock the Special Edition of Scream 2 ? (it's only available in the box set right now) I would also like to rent the bonus disc that comes in the Scream box set.

Thanks for listening,
Glennica

TheHud

What about talking to the DVD Talk people and seeing about getting your own Forum area? That way individual questions or comments can have their own follow-ups and not get mixed in with all the messages about other stores.

If you plan on keeping up with this, that might be the best way to run it.

RMDInc

First off today I just want to thank everybody for thanking us and remind you all that there wouldn't be a Rentmydvd.com without Rentmydvd.com customers- irate or otherwise. This forum is a great communication tool and the fact is that I, for one, really prefer dialogue to the one-sided nature of FAQs and even e-mail correspondence. It is actually rather amazing to me to think that this is an uncommon practice, but maybe I'm just easily amazed....
But I am also easily amused, enjoy kitch, and figured out how to use the smileys today. I will undoubtedly use them once and no longer be interested....
************************************************************
HepDude-
We used to have a due date on return envelopes for non-Membership users. I don't know where it went, but I will find out why it's gone. Unless there is a really good reason for its being gone we will definitely re-incorporate a due date into the printed materials for those mailers.
____________________________________________________________

jriems asks above for several items that I'm sure are not exclusively pondererings of jriems, so I've addressed them by topic. Glennica asks a similar question- same thing. Enjoy:



THE DATABASE: One of our goals as a company is to have a huge, complex, masterful, wonderful, detailed database of titles. Everything ever commited to recording. We are getting there, but as you can see there are problems. Right now (4pm PST 3/7/2001) "Not Available" means one of two things: either the title is not available on DVD or the title is on DVD but not available on our site. This will be changed- but more importantly, given the bent of jriems' message, will be the upcoming introduction of filters that will allow users to browse the entire site and only see those items which we actually have available for rent.

"LOST" IN THE MAIL: At present, we ask that our members refrain from reporting DVDs as "lost or delayed in the mail" unless 4 days have passed since dropping them off. In the future there will be a "delayed in mail" function on the website for the same purpose. We have not introduced this function for the reason that we want to make sure it is not abused; it would not be quite fair to all our customers if everyone suddenly had more than their Membership limit out at a time; "floating inventory" would most certainly lessen our title availability and increase all manner of problems. I can definitely appreciate trying to eke out a couple of extra rentals per month but we are trying to be utilitarian about the whole issue.

SIGNATURE EDITIONS, SPECIAL EDITIONS, GOLD EDITIONS, EDITED EDITIONS, COLLECTOR'S EDITIONS, PLATINUM EDITIONS, BRONZE EDITIONS, SLOPPY SILVER SLIPPER EDITIONS, NEW EDITIONS, OLD EDITIONS, RAINY-DAY EDITIONS:
And in the beginning there was one edition of every movie and the retailer saw this and he said "This is good."
And after several days there was introduced from L.A. the "unrated" version of any movie baring flesh and the retailer saw this and he said "Well at least it's a no-brainer"
And several more days passed and the artists took control of the product to whatever extent that they could and they put the movie back into the form of its original intent and they gave it to those in L.A. who proclaimed: "Behold! The Director's Cut! She hath repaired what we originally edited!" And the retailer saw this and said "Well couldn't you at least release them on the same day?"
And L.A. saw that the retailer was powerless to resist the consumer that wanted the director's cut and began the process of releasing all the editions of all the films that we have come to know and love. CE's and SE's are, call me biased, directors' cuts without directors' involvement. This does not change the fact that I, too, like special editions with behind-the-scenes footage and deleted scenes and alternate endings and all the rest. I love 'em. But it's like going into my favorite hamburger shop with a hankering for a burger with tomatoes, ordering, and finding out they have no tomatoes. Fine. I order one without and dig in. But don't tell me when I'm half-way into that burger that you got tomatoes in and that if I still want those tomatoes that I have to order a whole new burger. Not that I'm saying DVDs should be upgrade-able; I really don't want to have to send off to get Gladiator 2.1, but I think it's not unfair to ask for the good stuff first. If there has to be a normal edition and a SE of Scream 2- why not either release them together or release the SE first? I know the answer- I just like dreaming of a better world.

Our official policy is to try and get whatever is available. If an SE is released later than something we already have a lot of, it's just a guess, but you can assume that availability will be low on the SE. The simple fact is that for the vast majority, a re-release of Scream 2 is still simply Scream 2 and no ammount of extra special bonus features is going to make it anything more than Scream 2, meaning that we can't consider the SE a whole new entity and can't assume that it's going to have a high-demand. There's also the consideration of return-on-investment of the tomatoeless burger that looks less and less appetizing next to the new one. This entire rant applies to DTS as well.

Until next time.

And do make sure to take the RED CARPET CHALLENGE on the site before the 25th. Win a DVD player, free months of Membership, and DVDs. But if you win the DVD player please do not put tomatoes in it.


-Matt

RMDInc

TheHud-

I think that you have a great idea there. We are actually debating if we will go with that or if we will just start a forum on the site itself. We'll keep everyone posted.


-Matt

mdev

I have a couple of suggestions for titles to be carried by RMD. This past week, 12 Angry Men and Tapeheads both came out on DVD, and I'm sure I'm not the only one out there that would like to rent it. Other than that and a few other stocking issues, yours service is still great!

Chris Johnson

One new and very happy customer.