Blockbuster TV

Unfortunately, my cable options are limited in my part of town so we have to succumb to the exorbitant rates that our cable company, Comcast, makes us pay. It's absolutely horrible. The worst part about it is that they offer you "deals" that are supposed to save you more but in fact cost you more over the long run. One of the so called deals is that you get their On Demand service included as part of the big package. For those of you who don't know what On Demand is, it's a service Comcast offers, that I am sure other cable companies offer, that allows you to watch a selection of their movies, programs and TV programs. It's pretty much like a TiVo (DVR) but it only has a selection that they pick for you.

Anyway, the only thing we decided we wanted the On Demand for was the movies. We like to watch our fair share of movies and figured it would be a bit cheaper ordering them On Demand rather than going out to rent the movie. Boy were we wrong. First of all, the movie selection is very limited. It's only about 30 - 40 movies that they select themselves. New movies that become available for rent don't come on until about 4 weeks after DVD release and even then, it's only a select few that they decide to offer. So, basically, you're stuck paying for stuff you may not want to watch and can't watch what you want until they decide to show it.

Here's the solution. I am sure everyone by now has heard of NetFlix and Blockbuster Online. If not, these are services where individuals can go online and order a movie(s) they want and have it sent directly to their house via mail and they send it back via mail and get another one from their list in return. Blockbuster Online tops that by allowing the customer to bring the movie in to their store and exchange it for another one for free instead of going through the mail exchange program. However, recently, Blockbuster has raised their fees much higher for their service and limited the amount of in store exchanges that can be done according to the monthly fee the customer is paying. So, unless you watch tons of movies, the in store exchange policy is worthless. Due to the increase in rates and the loss of the exchange policy, in my opinion, Blockbuster's service is inferior to Netflix.

My thought is for Blockbuster, or any other company or individual for that matter, to create their own station where individuals can go online and search through all the movies out there and select which one they want to view. I don't really know the requirements or resources needed to make something like this happen but I don't see why it couldn't be done. And I truly believe that the company to offer this service first would most likely put a lot of companies out of business or at least gain a huge market share of the movie rental business. I personally would love to see a service like this offered.

So, as usual, thoughts, concerns, suggestions? Is it worth the time or is it a load of crap? Let me know what you think.

Thanks for reading.

Regards,

Bob