Personal Development DVDs
September 15th, 2005 by Steve Pavlina
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A few weeks ago my wife and I decided to try the Netflix video rental service. We both like watching movies together, and this service seemed like a good idea, especially since we’ve been miffed at Blockbuster for changing their rules in a way that’s been detrimental to us.
If you aren’t familiar with Netflix, it’s a service where you rent DVD movies by mail. They pay postage both ways and provide you with an envelope to use for the return mailing. You search their movie database to create a queue of movies you want to see, and whenever you mail back a movie, they send you another one from your list. You arrange your own rental queue in order of priority, and so far we’ve always received our top choices. We chose the $15 a month plan that lets us get 2 movies at a time, but there’s no limit on total rentals during the month except for the practical limit of mailing them back and forth. They’re speedy about mailing movies out, and since they have a shipping facility here in Las Vegas, it’s only two mailing days from returning a movie to getting a new one. They claim that 80% of their customers will get this same speed of delivery. So if we mail a movie back on Monday, we have a new one in our mailbox on Wednesday. Movies are mailed back individually, so if you have multiple ones checked out, you don’t have to mail them back at the same time. It’s very convenient having the new movies arrive in the mail and being able to return them by depositing them back in the mailbox across the street — this cuts out two trips to the video store for every rental. There are no deadlines for sending movies back.
Blockbuster offers a similar service now as well, but we wanted to give Netflix a try instead. We lost faith in Blockbuster after they launched their “no late fees” policy. Here’s a funny video someone sent me about that.
When we first signed up for this service, we were only thinking of it for entertainment, as a replacement for occasional local movie rentals. But after browsing Netflix’s special interest section, I found a variety of personal development and educational DVDs, including ones by Deepak Chopra, Suze Orman, Carolyn Myss, Eckhart Tolle, and Dr. Wayne Dyer. I watched three Suze Orman DVDs just in the past week. So I can recommend this service as an affordable way to immerse yourself in personal development material. It’s a lot cheaper and more convenient than going to seminars.
Netflix offers a two-week free trial by default, but if someone refers you, you get the whole first month free. If you’d like a referral, just let me know, and I’ll send you one via email. If they limit how many of these I can send out, then it’s first-come, first-served. As far as I know, I don’t get any special bonus if you choose to sign up. I just think it’s a worthwhile service if you find value in educational videos. You can soak up a lot of interesting content in a short period of time for very little money.
September 15th, 2005 at 10:47 am
Good reason to resume my Netflix account. Just cancelled the Blockbuster service yesterday.
September 16th, 2005 at 7:24 am
I’ve been a Netflix subscriber for something like 3-4 years. I’m currently on their 8 out at a time plan and have been for about the last year. We pretty much consider Netflix the “major network” in our house with the satellite channels all in 2nd or worse place.
Because their “shelf space” is only restricted by warehouse scale storage and not actual retail shelves, they, along with Amazon, are really making a business of the Long Tail* of DVD content. Instead of just the big hits, they can carry everything they can get their hands on. That includes personal development, tutorial stuff, documentaries, indie films, subtitled films (in whatever language combinations your culture would dictate), etc. Those titles won’t be checked out nearly as often as the latest summer blockbuster, but it doesn’t matter because they just won’t stock as many copies. However, even the most obscure title will be rented often enough to cover the cost of them buying a copy, so they just grab everything.
This moves us from a lowest common denominator distribution (what we’ve had for TV, movies and music for the last 80 years) to a “first choice” model where we actually get what we want** even if there aren’t 30 million other people looking for it as well
*Links to more info on the Long Tail
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Tail
http://longtail.typepad.com/the_long_tail/
**Lowest Common Denominator vs. First Choice
http://www.wynia.org/wordpress/2005/09/16/provoke-your-thoughts-george-gilder/