DVDs By Mail

In the Competition for DVD Rentals by Mail, Two Empires Strike Back

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/31/technology/circuits/31stat.html?position=&ei=5088&en=576305e8bef66d43&ex=1269925200&partner=rssnyt&pagewanted=print&position=

By DAVID POGUE

YOU might not imagine that there's a single movie-distribution channel left to invent. These days, a movie can reach you by pay-per-view, on a plane, at the video store, on a TV movie channel, on the Internet, at the front of a Greyhound bus, in the second row of a minivan or even - get this - in a movie theater. (Hey, it could happen.)

Not to seem ungrateful, but none of these mechanisms deliver the holy grail: any movie, any time. There is, however, a low-tech distribution channel that comes pretty darned close: DVD rentals by mail.

Seven years ago, Netflix invented the category, the business model and the prepaid two-way shipping envelope. Now, as three million subscribers are helping Netflix hit its profitable stride, Blockbuster and Wal-Mart have entered the market, taking a page from the Netflix playbook.

Actually, they've taken pretty much the entire playbook. All three services look and work almost exactly alike. Netflix must be furious.

The fun begins at each company's Web site, where you can look over its DVD collection. Netflix and Blockbuster list 40,000 and 35,000 titles, many times what you'll find at the video store. Wal-Mart brings up the rear with 16,000 movies.

Using a Search box, New Releases lists, movies by category and so on, you build a list of the movies you want to see, in the order you want to see them. This movie queue is a big deal; building it and customizing it give you the same sense of achievement as setting up your iPod playlists.

A day or two later, the first three discs arrive by mail, packed in a three-layer shipping envelope. After watching a movie, you rip off the top layer of the envelope, revealing the return address. When the company gets that DVD back, it mails you the next one in your queue.

Where you live determines the mailing times. Netflix has 30 distribution centers all over the country; Blockbuster has 23, and plans to add 7 by June. (Wal-Mart brings up the rear again with 14.) In metropolitan areas, if you ship a movie back on Monday, you'll generally get the next one on Wednesday or Thursday.

The appeal of these companies lies primarily in their convenience, vast selection and accommodation of your quirky tastes. But there may also be an economic attraction. Each company charges a flat monthly fee. For example, Netflix's three-DVD plan costs $18 a month; Blockbuster's, $15; Wal-Mart's, $17.36. (What's the matter? Focus groups didn't go for $17.37?)

For that money, you can watch as many DVD's as the Postal Service can bring you, as long as you never have more than three at a time. (Other plans are available for lighter or heavier appetites.) If you watch and return three movies a day, you could theoretically watch 40 DVD movies a month, all for the same $15. True, you wouldn't have a life, but you'd be paying only 38 cents a movie.

The best part is no late fees and no deadlines. A DVD can sit on your shelf for weeks, waiting for the mood to strike you. (That tends to happen with movies you've heard are great but depressing, like "House of Sand and Fog.") The rental company doesn't care; it is paid the same amount whether you return the thing or not. In other words, these plans banish one of life's nagging worries: the fear of racking up huge late charges.

As you can imagine, starting a DVD-by-mail operation is an enormous logistical challenge. In the early days, Netflix horror stories (scratched or lost discs, long delays) were commonplace. These days, though, Netflix's act is decidedly together; its customer service stories sometimes verge on the heroic. ("I once somehow managed to mail back one of my own DVD's in a Netflix return envelope," one reader wrote to me. "I was certain that I would never see that disc again, but I sent an e-mail to customer service anyway. I got a prompt reply saying that they would locate my DVD and send it back to me - and they did. No charge.")

Netflix (netflix.com) has the most subscribers, too: three million customers, versus 750,000 for Blockbuster. (Wal-Mart doesn't disclose its membership numbers.) And as it turns out, 800-pound gorilladom has its privileges. You'll find far more customer movie reviews on Netflix, which can shield you from renting duds. And Netflix's power in the industry occasionally translates into exclusives and early availability; Netflix had "The Incredibles" in my mailbox on the very day it was released by Pixar. (Blockbuster - no small industry player - says that it will soon announce exclusives.)

By their admission, Blockbuster (www.blockbuster.com) and Wal-Mart (www.walmart.com/dvdrentals) are still playing catch-up. Wal-Mart, for example, has only a small fraction of its rivals' movies and distribution centers. It is often the last of the three companies to get a new movie in stock. Its Web site doesn't offer any customer reviews. Surprisingly, its three-DVD plan is not even the price leader (Blockbuster has that distinction). So unless you believe in rooting for the underdog - has that word ever appeared in the same sentence with Wal-Mart before? - there's no good reason to choose it.

Blockbuster's DVD-rental Web site is a joy to navigate, but its status as a fledgling seven-month-old service is sometimes evident. For example, it tends to be overly cautious when estimating when you'll get the movies in your queue. The day before its release, "The Incredibles" was listed as "very long wait (six weeks or longer)," but it arrived in three days. And the Blockbuster site occasionally greets you with: "Sorry, but we needed to do a little housecleaning. Please check back later."

But Blockbuster offers an irresistible feature that its rivals will find impossible to duplicate: two downloadable rental coupons a month for anything from a Blockbuster store: DVD movies, VHS tapes or even video games. Movies-by-mail is great, but it doesn't approach that "Sorry about your day, honey; let's go pick up a movie" spontaneity.

Nor is that the only twist Blockbuster has, ahem, in store. Later this year it will increase the number of distribution centers by as much as 15,000 percent when it invites its 4,500 local stores to become DVD mailing centers. This audacious master plan ought to shave DVD shipping times drastically. (If the local store doesn't have the movie you want, one of the regular centers will send it out instead.)

There are, in other words, two winners here. Blockbuster is the value king, undercutting Netflix by $3 a month and offering in-store rentals; it's as though it is reimbursing you for tolerating its start-up glitches.

Netflix is the service king, the smoothest and the most reliable program. It's the only outfit with highly evolved features like separate queues for each family member (including individually addressed envelopes), each limited by movie rating, if you like. Netflix also offers far more plans than Blockbuster or Wal-Mart; you can sign up to have any number from two to eight discs out at a time, at prices from $12 to $48 a month. For busy people, a two-DVD plan is especially attractive; Blockbuster offers no such plan.

Before you cancel HBO and tear up your Blockbuster card, though, some words of caution. All three companies ship each DVD in a bare-bones envelope, so you don't get to see the artwork or the liner notes. Bonus discs count as separate titles. Scratched or unplayable discs are an occasional nuisance. (At each company's Web site, you can report the damage with one click. The company takes the DVD out of circulation and sends you a replacement.) Discs sometimes disappear in the mail, too; fortunately, you're not charged (at least if it doesn't happen with suspicious frequency).

Otherwise, though, the DVD-by-mail distribution channel is a brilliantly conceived solution to a classic new-millennium problem. You get exactly the movies you want, almost when you want them. Don't look now, but "movie channel" has just acquired a whole new meaning.

E-mail: Pogue@nytimes.com

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

One message -- many people

 

 From: woodyswatch.com

Don't use TO or CC for sending to groups of people who don't know each other. These days that is considered poor email etiquette. That?s because everyone who gets the email can see the email addresses of all the other recipients which could be considered a breach of privacy these days.

There's a more serious concern to do with spam and viruses. There are many email worms that search an infected hard drive for email address to send infected emails. Those worms can check not just the contacts list but also the history of received emails for new targets.  This doesn't really apply when you're sending messages to a small group of people who know each other, but caution is polite and prudent when the receivers are a disparate group who don't know each other.

If you send a email with a large TO or CC list to an infected computer then all those recipients are in the firing line to a new round of nasties.

Better to use BCC - Blind Carbon Copy - but this has its own disadvantages -- messages with BCC's are more likely to be considered spam. Emails sent directly to one person are, contra wise, less likely to be marked as spam.

BCC is quick and usually quite efficient. The BCC receivers should not see the email addresses of their compatriots (just anyone in the TO or CC fields).

We have heard the urban myth that the list of BCC recipients is actually hidden in each copy of the message and can be found by worms. This is plain wrong and looking at the message header on a BCC received message would show. The BCC recipients are stripped out when the email is relayed to each individual mailbox.

Printing an Envelope on the Fly

 

Whenever you need an envelope you can have Word whip one up for you on the fly. Follow these steps:

1. If you use Word 2002 or Word 2003, choose Tools, Letters and Mailings, Envelopes and Labels. (For Word 2000 users, choose Tools, Envelopes and Labels.)
2. In the Envelopes and Labels dialog box, type the address you want on the envelope. If you want to format the address, type it in the document first. Format it, select it, and then choose Tools, Letters and Mailing, Envelopes and Labels. Beware, though! If you select too much text, it may not all fit on the envelope.
3. Click the Print button.

Your printer may beep or otherwise prompt you to insert the envelope, or it may just print it right then and there.

Source: Dummies.com

Scanner Buying Guide

 

Source: Dummies.com

When shopping for a scanner, you'll want to look for a few important things. Here's a quick summary.

• Resolution: Scanners generally have a lot more resolution than you need, measured in samples per inch (spi). You'll also see terms dots per inch and pixels per inch applied to scanners, even though scanners don't have dots (printers do) or pixels (monitors do). Scanner resolution varies from 600 x 600 spi to 2400 x 2400 spi, or higher. Unless you're scanning tiny, very high resolution originals (such as postage stamps), anything more than 300 to 600 spi is overkill.
• Color depth: This is the number of colors a scanner can capture. The color depth is measured using something called bit depth. For example, a 24-bit scanner can capture 16.8 million different colors; a 30-bit scanner can grab a billion colors, and a 36-bit scanner can differentiate between . . . zillions of colors. You'll never have an original with that many different hues, however. In practice, the extra colors simply provide the scanner with an extended range (called dynamic range) so that the scanner can capture detail in very dark areas of the image as well as in very light areas.
• Speed: Some scanners are faster than others. If you're scanning a lot of photos, you'll want one that works quickly.
• Convenience: So-called "one-touch" scanners have buttons mounted on the front panel so that you can trigger the scanner to make a copy (that's sent to your printer), scan to a file, route a scan to e-mail, capture text with optical character recognition, or perform other functions.
• Bundled software: The best scanners are furnished with an easy standalone software interface plus a more professional scanning program that gives you total control over every scanning function. You also get drivers that let you access these interfaces from within programs, such as Photoshop. You may even get Photoshop (or a "Lite" version) bundled with the scanner, plus software to create panoramas, build Web pages, manage documents, and do other fun stuff.
• Accessories: Some scanners include sheet feeders (for scanning a stack of documents) or can be fitted with them as an option. Others have slide-scanning attachments or built-in slide-scanning tools. Depending on the kind of work you do, these accessories can be a perk or a necessity.

Digital Image Resizing Primer

http://www.bobatkins.com/photography/digital/digital_image_resizing.html

One aspect of digital images which seems to cause a lot of confusion to beginners is the matter of image size. There are three basic measures of image size

• Pixel count - e.g 3000x2000 pixels
• Physical size - e.g. 4" x 6"
• Resolution  - e.g. 72 pixels per inch (ppi)

The confusion seems to arise because people aren't sure of how these are related. They wonder if ppi affects the size of the image you see on a monitor screen. We know that displays are measured in pixels (e.g. a 1024x1280 display), and that screens are a given width (e.g. 15"), it seems logical that the pixels/inch setting should affect the size of the displayed image. Logical maybe, but wrong. Although monitors do have a measurable figure for ppi (pixels per inch), the ppi information in an image is NOT used for monitor display in web browsers.

Digital image files are "tagged" with other information. For example the width and height in pixels is in there, as is the resolution (ppi). Some image files also contain all sorts of information about the image, such as exposure data, focus data, flash data - and this is stored in what is referred to as the EXIF header. EXIF stands for Exchangeable Image File Format, and is a standard for storing interchange information in image files, especially those using JPEG compression. So how is this information used, and what uses it?

Read the Full Primer here:
http://www.bobatkins.com/photography/digital/digital_image_resizing.html