For the last four summers, Stephanie and I have subscribed to Netflix.  It’s something I mentioned on this blog way back in 2005.  We find that we can get our money’s worth in just three or four months, and watch everything worth watching from the last year.  But this summer when I went to sign up for Netflix I found that they are charging extra for Blu-Ray, which they didn’t do last summer.  So I decided to use Blockbuster, since they do not charge extra for Blu-Ray.  Here are a few things that are different, for anyone wondering how the services compare:

• Blockbuster doesn’t charge extra for Blu-Ray (see above).

• Blockbuster lets you return a movie to a physical store, which means that you get your next movie a day faster than you do with Netflix.
  

  • Now, you might think you’d be able to exchange a movie in-store with another movie.  You can, but you have to pay extra for that.  I didn’t bother (although I got five free in-store exchanges my first month, of which I used two).

  • For some stupid reason, if you do exchange in-store, you can only exchange a mailed movie for a store movie.  In other words, say you got Air Bud1 in the mail.  You watch it, and exchange it in the store for Air Bud: Golden Receiver.  Now, since you didn’t get Golden Receiver in the mail, you can’t exchange it in store for Air Bud: World Pup2.

  • Of course, for this to be helpful, there needs to be a Blockbuster nearby.  The store a quarter-mile from my house went out of business a month after I signed up, and the next closest one is five miles away and not on the way to anywhere. :(

• Blockbuster’s selection seemed to be a little spottier on random things.  (For example, Steph wanted to rent My Little Pony: The Movie and it was listed as “Very Long Wait” all summer.)  Other than that, we were able to get everything we wanted.

• I’m not sure if Blockbuster has a movie-streaming option.  I’m pretty sure they don’t.  I never used it on Netflix, and I wouldn’t use it on Blockbuster, so that’s not a detraction for me.

• Blockbuster lets you rate movies in half-star intervals.  Which is nice.  Sometimes you want to give a movie 3.5 stars, not 3 or 4.

• Netflix’s movie suggestion algorithm seemed a little bit less terrible than Blockbuster’s.

• Netflix’s website was faster and more responsive.

• When you cancel your membership with Blockbuster, you get a month to return the movies you have out.  With Netflix you only get seven days.

At this point, I’ll still subscribe to Blockbuster next summer, as long as they don’t add a charge (or charge more than Netflix) for Blu-Ray rentals.

Update: See my follow-up post for more.