So today I cancelled my subscription to Zip, the Canadian equivalent to NetFix. I liked the idea, but it didn’t work for me. Some of the reasons are:
- You don’t get the DVDs you want in a timely fashion. At best you chose something and it comes a week later, but most of the time I would have forgotten why I listed something by the time it came, if at all. In other words you can’t scratch a desire.
- All the stuff you really want to watch never seems to come. You have to have this long list and stuff comes based on availability which seems random. With a video store at least what you find on the shelf you can see that evening.
- I had the 4 DVD service, but they didn’t seem to send me more than three at a time. I suspect they don’t have enough copies to handle the traffic.
- The stuff that comes never seems to be the stuff I want to watch tonight. That’s the problem of depending on availability – you get what they have on hand not what you feel like any particular night. So I would go out and rent a video while letting the Zip DVDs lie around unwatched.
- It’s not worth the money unless you watch the DVDs when they come in and send them back pronto.
- I began to get notices that DVDs I put on my list were not available at all. Why is this? Do they list things they don’t have and then buy them (or not) when someone asks for them? Or do they not replace damaged copies?
To be fair, I’ve seem some hard-to-get movies through Zip that were terrific like Ali Zoua: Prince of the Streets (2000) – one of the most moving movies I’ve seen for while. It’s about and acted by glue-sniffing street kids in Casablanca and felt more authentic than anything else of its kind. Zip is also good for TV series. Once they send you the first episode in a series you get the others in sequence. (What would be more annoying that get the first DVD of the second season of the Wire and then not getting the second DVD for a month?)
Anyway, I’m back to renting while I wait for the ability to buy/rent online directly.