It’s happened to everyone. You just want a fun night at home, eating Ben and Jerry’s and lounging around with friends watching the latest Brad Pitt or Natalie Portman flick. You get to the movie store and are poised to pluck your chosen film off the shelf, when it hits you. They’re all gone. Sold out. The fantasies of Brad and Natalie wither away before your eyes.

Though movie rentals are a $9 billion business, renting from retail stores may become a thing of the past. In today’s fast-paced world, people are less willing to stand in long lines at Blockbuster or Movie Gallery. Enter the rise of online movie rentals from companies such as Netflix.

‘Netflix created the online movie rental business as it exists now,’ said Steve Swasey, director of corporate communications at Netflix. ‘At the time it was of course scoffed at, but Netflix knew it was on to something. And now we have more than 5 million subscribers, and we forecast 20 million by 2010 to 2012.’

The rising popularity of services such as Netflix may be boosted by lack of convenient video rental stores. SU students no longer have the option of renting from the Movie Gallery store previously located in Marshall Square Mall. Despite an estimated 4,700 locations in North America, the closest store to Syracuse is now in Lakeland, about a 15-minute drive from campus.

Syracuse students looking for a rental venue also have the option of OneClickVideo, an online movie rental service that specifically serves the SU campus and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

OneClickVideo offers upwards of 3,000 titles for members to choose from. These titles are then delivered by drivers to the students’ residences and can be returned using one of five drop boxes located on campus, including one on South Campus. Like they do with Netflix, OneClickVideo members may have two movies out at a time, and can receive new movies once previously rented movies are returned.

For those lazy evenings not right for partying, Jim Tiedemann, a sophomore English education major and Netflix subscriber, says movies are a perfect way to spend the night. ‘When I’m not going out I sit in and watch a movie,’ he said. ‘On your nights off it’s the best thing to do, you just hang out and chill.’

I like Netflix because I don’t have to go anywhere, and it’s cheap, and there’s every single movie you could possibly want,’ Tiedemann said.

Netflix has even caused the retail giant Blockbuster to take notice and make its own changes. In September 2003, Blockbuster extended its standard rental time to a week, and on January 1, 2005, the company did away with late fees. Despite these obvious attempts to win back customers, rumors of Blockbuster filing for bankruptcy ran wild that year.But it wasn’t until seven years after Netflix launched that Blockbuster decided to fight fire with fire.

‘We’ve been monitoring competition, whether it be online renting or retail renting, for a long time,’ said Blockbuster spokesman Randy Hargrove. ‘We’ve been looking at the online segment and decided to launch Blockbuster Online in August of 2004 because we saw the online renting as a growing segment.’

Blockbuster Online boasts 1.4 million subscribers, according to Hargrove. But 1.4 million is only a fraction of Netflix’s reported 5.2 million, and Blockbuster Online offers 10,000 fewer titles than Netflix’s 65,000 titles in stock. But Blockbuster has not given up its retail stores, and Hargrove insists that the company is still working to keep customers.According to Swasey, 80 percent of what video stores carry are new releases which rotate every three to four months, something he considers limiting.

‘More than 70 percent of what we rent every day is non-new release,’ Swasey said. ‘America’s taste in movies is broad and vast, which can be fulfilled at Netflix and not a video store, because they tend to only offer new releases.’

He argues that most college students have eclectic tastes and documentaries, foreign films or subgenre films are not often options at a video store.

Selection aside, video rentals can be expensive, much to the chagrin of the poor college student. Hargrove suggests that if one is on a fixed budget, as many college students are, and doesn’t have much time to watch movies, it may be better to continue renting on a single transaction basis from a store.

Although online services often do offer a wider breadth of movie titles, this is only a benefit for the truly avid movie viewer. Hargrove points out that many times movie viewing is ‘spur of the moment’ and for those Friday nights when only an impromptu 80s movie marathon will do, a traditional movie store is the only way to go. For this reason, Hargrove believes movie stores will continue to remain popular.

Tidemann says he’s not bothered by the lack of spontaneity of Netflix, saying that getting movies in the mail is always exciting.

‘They have a really, really wide selection and you just make a list of movies that you want,’ Tidemann said. ‘You don’t worry about what movie comes in the mail, its going to be something you want.’

Tiedemann believes online services are much more convenient for students, especially those without cars.

‘(Netflix) sends the movies to your mailbox and you don’t have to have cash to pay for it because it’s a monthly subscription,’ he said. ‘So you don’t have to worry about running out of money for it.’

Swasey refers to the ever-increasing frequency of people switching from video rental stores to online services as the tipping point.

‘If you add the subscribers (of Blockbuster Online and Netflix) you get 7 million and that’s people who weren’t (renting online) seven years ago,’ Swasey said. ‘This influx is something Netflix forecasted. This influx indicates the way of the future.’

If You Netflix:

Netflix.com

65,000 titles in stock

5.2 million subscribers

2 DVDs at a time $14.99

3 DVDs at a time $17.99

4 DVDs at a time $23.99

5 DVDs at a time $29.99

Published on August 29, 2006 at 12:00 pm