Wal Mart is an established brand. They can hang a few banners in their stores advertising the service and get it going, Netflix has to spend a fortune to establish themselves. The coming price increase widens the price gap considerably, and who would be most likely to drop because of this? Someone that turns over 10 DVD's a month, that does the math and figures hey i'm still only out a few bucks/DVD, or the prized, just rent a few a month type that is already paying a high cost per disk, that says to hell with it, i'll just go to blockbuster, or hey, i'm not renting that many anyway maybe i should try cheapo Wal Mart and there 2 at a time service.
The real killer for Netflix is programs like DVD Decrypter. Receive DVD from Netflix, Pop the DVD in your computer, click a couple of buttons, rip it to your hard drive, remove dvd, put back in mailer, send back out, watch DVD from computer whenever you feel like it. With the huge growth in Home Theater PC's, this is a big hurt, and especially because the tech savvy people that can do something like this, are the same kind of people that would use Netflix. |
