A Day, A Week, Hemant, A Year

A few months ago I blogged about my early experiences with Zip.ca, an online movie rental company. I talked about the great money savings and convenience the service offered, but did outline a few problems that I hoped to evaluate as I continued my membership. Being a member for about three months, I felt that this was a sufficient period to honestly evaluate the service.

In short, I give Zip.ca an ‘F’ (where ‘F’ stand for ‘fail’, not ‘fantastic’ or ‘fabulous’). My main issue after three months was the same issue I exposed after only a couple of weeks - the movies I would get in the mail were old. So old in fact, that they were usually showing on the movie channels I subscribe to through my cable service. For instance, one of the last movies I received before canceling my membership was Walk the Line, which had been showing on Movie Central for about a month.

So I essentially felt as though I was being double-charged. I was paying $24.95 a month to receive movies I was already paying for through my cable subscription. Since I’m a logical kind of guy, this just didn’t seem like a good deal to me anymore.

In my opinion, I believe that Zip.ca is a victim of its own design. The convenience and money-saving positives that the service offers gives rise to the stale products they provide. Since members can keep their selections for as long as they want, those waiting for those titles suffer. I think you can see similar trends with Blockbuster’s ‘No Late Fees’ drive. Sure, this was great if you didn’t get a chance to watch your rentals in the rental time constraints and needed an extra day or two. But people took advantage of this offer and more-or-less killed it. People ended up keeping movies for weeks on end - probably not because they needed a couple extra days to watch them - but just because they were lazy and didn’t want to bother returning them. So Blockbuster’s ‘No Late Fees’ pretty much made it impossible for you to rent ‘new releases’ because they were all gathering dust in members’ houses. Due to this, Blockbuster has slowly phased their ‘No Late Fees’ out.

Another Zip feature that I feel contributes to the problem is their ZipList. Since Zip ’suggests’ that you keep a ‘ZipList’ of at least twenty titles, you usually end up having to select movies that you really don’t want to see. And as it turned out, these were the movies I would usually end up receiving.

I haven’t really spoke to any other Zip.ca members to see if they have had similar experiences, so I really can’t make a blanket statement that Zip.ca sucks. Maybe others are receiving new releases in a timely fashion (I mean, someone out there has to be getting the new movies), or are willing to put up with not getting the most recent movies, and are fine with the trade-off for getting great savings. I personally cannot. I was seeing the commercials for so many great movies being released on DVD, but I was not getting a chance to see them. Now that I’ve put Zip.ca behind me, I feel free again, having the opportunity to see films as soon as they are released on DVD.