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Comment by bonton89 | Hacker News Reader

I'm quite annoyed that netflix let their DVD service just rot. For quite awhile I was using it as a nice value add to the couple of streaming services I had, to watch new movies or catch a single show from some service I wasn't interested in subscribing too. But then they stopped even replacing broken discs so there were holes in series so it lost a lot its usefulness.

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This. And in many cases, it was not just a supplement to their streaming catalogue. A family friend lives in Alaska and has a very low data cap and relied on Netflix's DVD service, and obviously can't be use Netflix anymore. I get cases like this are a very very low percentage of their userbase, but still unfortunate for so many to lose access to an easy media solution that never cost Netflix much to begin with

Agreed. I stuck with it until the bitter end since the catalog was far larger, and curiously, at least here in the USA, streaming in french (or spanish) is not available in many cases, while the DVDs usually had the french I suppose to cover Québec.

Another annoyance is once they killed off the service I was unable to get my DVD queue out to import into https://www.cafedvd.com/ despite going through their EU data request mechanism. They had the rest of the info on my account but they'd either deleted that data (unlikely for a large company to throw out a source of user preference info) or made it inaccessible to the team fulfilling the request. After repeated requests I gave up.

How does Redbox compare? I always see their kiosks, but I never think to look. I'm also surprised and amused to learn it's owned by Chicken Soup for the Soul. Yes, that Chicken Soup for the Soul.

Most I've used have a very small selection, maybe 30 total options, but a lot of those can be out of stock. If you have any sort of criteria (like I'm often looking for movies we could watch with our kids) there might only be one or two choices.

I'd compare it to showing up at a cinema and just hoping to find a show that looked interesting and happened to be starting soon.

Yeah. I use them now and then for a current movie. But between the limited selection and the fact that I'll probably have to hop in the car for a dedicated trip the next day to return the movie, I use them pretty rarely.

The biggest weakness with redbox is that is just doesn't have much of a catalog as I understand it. I've never really used them.

My local library is the next best thing to netflix DVDs, but it isn't the same at all.

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