By Davis Freeberg
Shawn Morton has an interesting tip for any Netflix subscribers who’ve made their way onto the Netflix throttle/smoothing list. With their subscriber base having increased by 60% over the last year, Netflix’s new releases have become increasingly difficult to get ahold of. This has been less of an issue for myself because I actually prefer older content, but I know that a lot of subscribers have expressed some frustration with their inability to get new releases. During their earnings call Netflix announced that they will be increasing their DVD purchases in the first quarter by about 20% over what it was last year. While there are no guarantees that this will ensure that heavy renters have access to new releases, it should help to improve the service. In the meantime, Netflix subscribers can use the following hack to get access to some of the new releases.
“I decided that, if I only had new releases which had “Long wait” or “Very long wait” in my queue, Netflix would have to send me something. Otherwise, I would be paying for something that they couldn’t deliver on (i.e. I pay for 3 discs at a time, but you can only give me 1 disc right now).
It may be luck at this point; however, the system appears to be working. Earlier this week, NF showed that they had received one of my movies back, so I quickly put “40 Year Old Virgin” in my queue (which also had a couple of other movies that were listed as available now). The status of “Virgin” was initially listed as “Very long wait. As a test, I took out all of the other movies in my queue. Within about an hour, the status of “Virgin” switched from “Very long wait” to “Shipping.” I got it the next day.”
I’m sure that if a lot of people starting to take advantage of this that Netflix would find some way to prevent people from gaming the system, but in the near term, this is a pretty clever way to force Netflix to give heavy renters access to their new releases.
I guess this is a good time to plug Blockbuster Online. I’ve been with them for about a year now and 90% of the time I always receive new release movies the that they become available.
My trick is to make sure all my old movies are in the post office box by Sunday, and I usually get Tuesday’s releases on Tuesday or Wednesday.
I guess my problem with this is my queue has something like 200 DVDs in it. Removing everything and adding it back in would be tedious, to say the least.
I think I’ll just wait it out. There’s lots of stuff to watch while I wait for the “long wait” stuff. It wouldn’t be in my queue if I weren’t interested…