Other Uses For Netflix
This article in the recent issue of Newsweek had me laughing. It’s about some unorthodox uses of Netflix by traditional businesses and institutions.
Basically, an independent video store sometimes turns to a personal Netflix account to get hard-to-find videos, sticks them into an empty DVD box, and rents them to customers for $4.50 a pop.
“It’s nice to be able to offer the latest foreign title that no one has heard of,” says one Massachusetts store owner, who typically rents out 10 to 15 Netflix discs a month, saving more than $2,000 in annual inventory costs.
While that would be slightly annoying from the customer’s point of view, a public library does this back door Netflix action one better:
Last month the Sanbornton Public Library in Sanbornton, N.H., put an article in its local paper inviting the public to sign out DVDs via the library’s Netflix account, effectively piggybacking the town’s 2,900 residents on a single account.
I suppose on some level, this isn’t any different from the local mom and pop restaurant loading up on cases bottled water at Costco and then marking ‘em all up. That said, I’d be pretty annoyed to find out the local video store was pulling this “outside of the DVD box” thinking.
Good for them. I wouldn’t be bothered at all to hear that a local video store was renting that way. It’s hard enough for them to stay in business without me insisting that they own a copy of every single title that may not be a successful rental. Of course, I would just put the items in my own Netflix queue in most cases, but if you were a technophobe or if you just wanted it right away, it would work out pretty well.
I’d think that either of those schemes would somehow run afoul of Netflix’s terms of service.
You are correct, both of them do. However Netflix says they have limited ability to police this. I can imagine this is true because after they send out the DVD, they don’t have any way of knowing what the end user *really* does with the DVD before it’s returned.
There’s a trick, you know.