A Day, A Week, Hemant, A Year

About two weeks ago I was talking to Curtis about the XBox 360 and the three year warranty extension that Microsoft had granted all customers. I mentioned to him how he, Travis, and I had been lucky up to this point since so many other people have had their 360s pile up on them. I felt the urge to knock on wood, but I’m not a superstitious guy so I said, “screw that.”

The very next night I was trying to watch a movie with my 360, but it kept freezing. Blaming Rogers Video for their frequently scratched DVDs, I cursed to myself as I tried to clean the disc. But to my surprise, the movie continued to freeze. I decided to recycle the power on my 360 when I was greeted with the notorious “Red Ring of Death”. You can see my poor 360 below.

After calmly stating out loud, “My 360 just died”, I quickly turned it off in hopes that it was just an anomaly. I let out a sigh of relief when the the “Red Ring of Death” didn’t return, but my hopes were dashed when the 360 splash screen froze. I turned it off, not to try and turn it on again until tonight. Sure enough, the “Red Ring of Death” returned, and it was time to call Microsoft.

After walking through a couple of paltry troubleshooting techniques with the support rep, he finally agreed that I had experienced a hardware failure, and we set up the warranty claim. I’m happy that the repair process is fairly straight forward, and free to me, but I’m just hoping that I don’t have Jeffrey’s experience from hell. If this had happened at any other time, it wouldn’t really have been a big deal (I haven’t actually played a 360 game all summer). But with the release of Halo 3 tonight, I’m definitely SOL. The timing couldn’t have been worse.

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.