As I drove back from dinner tonight, I noticed Hollywood Video on Silver Spring (technically in Glendale) has closed.
I'm partially responsible for driving it out of business.
Two months ago, I subscribed to Netflix. And I love it.
I think the primary reason I wanted to join was that .. I miss a lot of movies I want to see. I hear reviews, see trailers, and have a desire to see many movies each year, but we just never get around to seeing a tenth of them, whether at the Fox Bay, or from renting them at the now defunct Hollywood Video.
The solution is Netflix's queue. See a movie you want to eventually watch? Put it in your queue. Once it comes out on DVD, it'll show up in your mailbox like magic.
I started out on the $5/month plan, where you get two DVDs each month. I figured I could easily find time to watch one movie every two weeks. After I put 25 movies in my queue, I realized, crap, it's gonna take a year to see all those movies.
So I bumped my plan to the $14/month deal that gets you two DVDs at a time, with no monthly limit. My evil plan is to blow through the list in 2-3 months, then drop back down to the $5 plan.
How to pay for it? Well, do you get HBO? Do you actually watch it? Turns out, we didn't. Even with a dozen HBO channels, neither my wife nor I find movies we want to watch on HBO, except on rare occasion. Do a household survey and count up the number of movies you actually watch on HBO. If it's less than 5 or 6 .. cancel it. Quit HBO, and pick up Netflix.
Netflix is extraordinarily easy .. DVDs are shipped to you in one day, you watch 'em, and stick them in their postage-paid return envelope for your mailman to take. They receive them in one day, and ship a new one to you immediately for the next day. Pretty slick. Netflix sends over 1 million DVDs in the mail every day.
So .. sorry, Hollywood Video. Gosh, I sure hope Aurora Health Care doesn't find out, abandon their plans for the WFB clinic, and take that newly empty spot in prime Glendale, wink, wink.
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