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.

Anyone who knows me would probably tell you that I am a pretty big movie buff. I generally like all types of movies - action, horror, sci-fi, documentary, foreign, and yes, even romantic comedies. I prefer to see films at the theatre, but since Saskatoon has pretty lame ones, I’ve been missing out on that experience a bit since I moved back. Thankfully I also have a fairly decent home theatre setup that let’s me enjoy films in the comfort of my home.

Despite my love for seeing movies on the big screen, I rent a LOT of movies. I’ve tried to rent movies with my friends, and we literally cannot find ones worth renting that I haven’t already seen. While living in Guelph, I was probably Blockbuster’s best customer - seriously. The entire staff knew me by name - which I guess could be a little emabarassing, since they probably figured I didn’t have much of a life. When I got back to Saskatoon, my movie renting habit continued - and my movie spending continued to sky-rocket. I figured there had to be something better out there (that is, beyond pirating movies off of the internet).

The United States has had a service for some time called NetFlix, which essentially lets you rent movies over the internet, and have them delivered in the mail. Recently, Canada had such a service introduced called Zip.ca (on a sidenote, my cousin actually developed Zip, and my mother helped ‘beta test’ the mailing service since she worked for Canada Post at the time). I had known about this service since it was introduced, but I never took the plunge into signing up until last month. Zip defines themselves as follows:

Zip.ca is Canada’s largest online video service. We offer members access to an ever-growing DVD library of over 51,000 titles. Our convenient membership service combines a simple title-selection process, no due dates or late fees, and quick home-delivery.

There is a number of different packages you can choose from. The one I chose is $24.95 per month and I can have four rentals out at a time. After eleven rentals in a month, I get charged $2.95 per rental for shipping. I can’t see myself exceeding this limit, even though I will probably use the full eleven rentals. So, from a monetary standpoint, I’m saving a lot of money.

It’s pretty simple how it works. You have a ZipList where you add titles you’d like to rent. You simply browse through the inventory, and click the ‘rent’ button to add them to your ZipList. It’s pretty straight forward. You can also prioritize the order that you would prefer movies to be sent to you, but I’m not sure how much weight this actually has. As movies are shipped to you, your ZipList shows the date they were shipped, and the estimated arrival date. When you receive the movies, they include a postage paid envelope you use to mail back to Zip. It’s all quite slick.

After being a Zip member for about a month now, here’s my feelings.

• It’s difficult to receive new releases. I’m tending to get a lot of the older releases sent to me. Some of them are actually showing on my movie cable channels.
• I’m a little worried if I’ll receive new releases in a reasonable amount of time. I generally can go to Rogers or Blockbuster and rent a brand new release, when I want. Do I really want to wait a month? Two months? - to receive a new release? I don’t know if that will be the case since I’ve only been on board for a month. I’ll have to evaluate this as time goes on.
• It’s good that all movies on Zip are in widescreen format.
• Some movies are available in Blu-ray format, which is cool (but I don’t have a player to view them).
• A great money-saver.

Something else I’d like to mention, that I’m really unhappy with, happened recently. “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” was supposedly shipped to me on July 27, and had an estimated arrival date of July 31st. I never received it. I reported this via the Zip site - which they classified as a stolen DVD. Despite the fact that I didn’t recieve the movie, it still is showing as being in my possesion, thus limiting me to three rented DVDs, rather than four. I opened a ticket with Zip about this, and they informed me that stolen DVD investigations can take up to 21 days, and that rental slot will only become available when it is resolved. Weak.

All-in-all, I really like the convenience of renting movies from my computer, whenever I want, and the money-saving possibilities are incredible. It may be too early however, to fully evaluate if this service is for me. The downfalls I have identified will probably be a deal-breaker if they tend to be the norm. I really hope that members are given priority, based on their standing, such as frequency of rentals and speed of returns. If that’s the case, I think I may rank quite high, since I see myself using this service exclusively, and tend to watch the movies as soon as I receive them, mailing them back the next day. Hopefully they don’t assume I’m just copying and returning them.

Note: Saskatoon’s theatre problems are coming to an end as a new Galaxy Cinema is nearing completion.