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How to get low cost DVD movies instead of doing movie rentals
Posted: admin on Sep 06 | Entertainment
Peerflix’s mission is to allow our members to get the most value out of the entertainment they own. Our immediate goal is to create a vibrant online community that enables individuals to truly leverage their personal collections, deriving maximum fun, enjoyment, and value from the DVDs that they already have at home.
Unlimited entertainment at a great value: that’s what Peerflix is all about.
The Difference
Leveraging a platform that is fast, easy-to-use and anonymous, Peerflix offers a better way to trade DVD’s and things online.
Unlike other services, Peerflix does not keep merchandise in warehouses around the country. Instead, we facilitate our members trading directly with one another to enable a fast trading cycle and reduced costs. Rather than pair people in one-to-one swaps, our technology matches up products and people across the entire network, maximizing the number of possible trades and the speed at which they occur. For example, Joe can ship a DVD to Jane and receive a DVD from Jay all within hours or days of joining the community. And the connections go on and on, around the clock and across the country.
Trading on the Peerflix network is easy. Each member builds their own “Have” list of DVDs that they are looking to trade, as well as a “Want” list of DVDs that they would like to receive. Members can quickly upload their DVD collection by entering either UPC codes or product titles. They can browse thousands of DVDs from our database and add them to their “Want” list with just one click.
To balance the relative value of different items within the network, we use trading credits called “Peerbux”. Every DVD has a Peerbux value assigned to it, based on network demand and retail price. When a member sends a DVD to another member, they earn Peerbux, which allows them in turn to receive merchandise of comparable value.
Check out the difference with Peerflix with our risk-free trial. We’re confident you’ll love it!
Our History
Peerflix was founded in 2004 by Danny Robinson and Billy McNair. The two entrepreneurs had previously teamed up to launch Spinway, Inc., a pioneer provider of e-commerce and private-label ISP solutions for leading brick and mortar retailers. Spinway was acquired by Bluelight.com, the ecommerce division of Kmart, in December 2000.
Through word of mouth, we acquired our first few hundred members, which quickly grew to several thousand. Then, The New York Times wrote a solid recommendation of Peerflix, as did The Seattle Times, Video Store Magazine, and a number of other publications and blogs (for more, visit our In The News section). In less than a year, our community has experienced exponential growth with over 25,000 DVDs currently being requested for trade on the site.
Today, we are focusing on providing an increasingly robust trading platform that will move us toward the fully functional non-beta release. Eventually, the service will evolve to add new trading categories beyond DVDs to the network. If you have ideas about categories you’d like to see on the site…let us know.
Peerflix is headquartered in Menlo Park, California and has development offices in Vancouver, Canada.
A couple of comments found in Blogs about Peerflix:
If you own any DVDs that you no longer want or need, you should consider signing up for Peerflix. It’s is a great new service (out of Vancouver!) that I just signed up for a few weeks ago. The way it works is you register the DVDs that you own by entering their UPC codes into the site. Peerflix will send you some envelope mailers. When people to request the DVDs, Peerflix sends you an email with their address. You send it to them, and thereby accrue Peerbux. Likewise, you enter a list of DVDs you’re interested in receiving, and they are sent to you by other Peerflix users, and the Peerbux are deducted from your account. The first 10 trades are free, and then 99 cents each thereafter.
Some things they could do to improve the service: mainly, give us more information.
* What are the most requested DVDs? then people could go out, and buy the DVDs they were interested in knowing they could then send them out to other Peerflix users after they were done with it.
* Where are Peerflix users? Since you want to send to people that are in your region (i.e. Canada or another country) this is crucial info.
* Build a community site! Let Peerflix users with the same taste in movies meet one another, and decide who will buy which movie, and then trade them.
Peerflix likely believes this would reduce business, but I suspect it would not. The incentive to earn Peerbux is too strong.
So far I’ve been impressed. Give it a try, and let me know if it works out for you.
A person comparing Peerflix to Numberslate:
This little experiment had a clear winner – PeerFlix.
The fact that it took me over a week to receive even one DVD from NumberSlate and that I stayed a member for another two weeks without receiving a DVD made me drop their service within the month. Even though NumberSlate prides on the fact that they use padded envelopes, I found them to be uneccessary, difficult to relabel, and expensive to resend.
PeerFlix has some quirks, but it can’t be beat for $5/month. Over the month, I received 5 DVDs and sent out two. The provided envelopes and the ability to print out a mailing sheet directly from your computer were both big pluses in my book. The one thing that I really didn’t like about PeerFlix was that once I received my movie, it tended not to be requested by other customers. This being the case, I found it difficult to accumulate Peerbux. For example, I requested and received the movie Bad Boys II. The movie came within 5 days of my request, I watched the movie, put it back on the movies that I have available, but nobody has requested it since. Therefore, I’m going to be stuck with it until somebody makes the request.
Neither of these services had as good of performance as NetFlix, but they do fill in a niche. I’m definitely going to continue my $5/month subscription with PeerFlix to see the new web site and hopefully continue using them. However, I’m not yet going to drop my NetFlix subscription for the mere fact that NetFlix provides a more consistent flow of movies into the house.
I obviously haven’t been able to write up all my thoughts on the two companies, but will be more than glad to answer any specific questions through the comment section of this blog entry.
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