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We love renting movies from Redbox. For only a dollar a night (often free with Redbox promo codes) we can rent recent releases.
For older titles, we rent from the library. Tony’s university library has a wide array of art films, mainstream titles, and TV series. They’re also pretty good about adding new titles quickly, but there’s often a long wait list for newer films that become available. We’ve rented a ton of great stuff from the library for free. It’s our favorite way to rent movies.
While Redbox and the library are perfect for new releases and mainstream titles, we often want to see art films and TV series that aren’t available through Redbox.
Lately, we’ve been considering other options for movie rentals. Online movie rental sites like Netflix and Blockbuster now offer online movie watching. Instead of waiting for a movie to be shipped to us, we can select what we want to see and watch it right on our computer. We like this idea, because it would allow us to watch a lot of movies even with the minimum one-DVD-at-a-time membership.
We’re considering joining Netflix with the minimum membership so that we can get art films and TV series either mailed to us or streamed to our computers. (We looked into Blockbuster, too, but their streaming service requires Internet Explorer on a PC, and we both have Macs.) For $8.99 a month, we could rent one DVD at a time and watch unlimited movies online.
We’re going to do a free trial first. Before we sign up, though, I just wanted to see if any of you have used this service. Are you happy with it? What is the selection of online movies like? I know they have a huge selection of movies by mail, but are all of the titles available to watch online? Do you still find yourself using Redbox or other rental services for convenience?
I’d only justify the Netflix service if we were currently otherwise spending $9 a month to rent/buy movies. If we would break even by, say, paying for Netflix instead of renting 3 Blockbuster movies or 9 RedBox movies or buying a movie every month or two- then Netflix would be worth it, totally.
For us, there are enough free RedBox codes and movies to re-watch in our own library that we don’t come close to spending $9/month on home-movie-related entertainment, so we’ve yet to justify it. I look forward to hearing about your experience!
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My husband said that you can go online and get additional movies from Redbox. They will have it at the box you use the next day for you.
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Hey Karen! My boyfriend and I heart Netflix! We watch some things online (mainly tv shows), since he just bought a nice big computer screen a few months ago, but there are still a lot of movies we like watch on the TV. One of the things I really like about Netflix is that you can set up sub-accounts. For example, I have my own account attached to his account, specifically for all my chick flix and girly tv shows. That way, we’re not always arguing over whose movie gets to come next on the queue.
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I have never used Redbox. We do have a membership at our local movie rental store but rarely use it. We rent some movies from the library, although, like you mentioned, there can be a long wait for new releases. We also have a Netflix account. I like the convenience of browsing the listings online, then having them show up in my mailbox. We get new releases alot faster than we can from the library, and we don’t have to worry about late fees when we forget to drop them off at the store (which happened alot when we rented from the video store). The online movies are somewhat limited, but still a decent selection.
For me, I like that I pay one fee and never have to worry about returning movies on time to avoid late charges, and not having to leave the house to pick out movies. The queue is great too. You just select the movies you want to put in your queue, then they mail them out to you as soon as they receive the previous one.
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I agree with Carla. We have a Netflix subscription ($8.99 version) and love it! You can find great old movies and of course the latest and greatest. They also have lots of good independent films that you may not find at a video rental place. We have only used the online streaming a few times but it is nice. The selection for that is not bad either.
I doubt this is allowed, but we share Shane’s mom’s Netflix subscription. We just watch things online from time to time — she does the mail-order thing and doesn’t bother with shows and movies online.
We have a computer hooked up to a TV so it works pretty well!
For all the movies you can watch for $9/month, I’d say Netflix is a pretty good deal. Even if you got a bigger package (that’s what she said), it would still be worthwhile if you used it.
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Thanks so much for weighing in everyone! We’re considering Netflix not because we’re spending money on movies (in fact, between Redbox promos and the library, we rarely spend any money on movie rentals), but because we have trouble finding the movies we really want to see through cheap and free places. Netflix offers the art films and rare releases we really want to see! I think we’ll try a trial and just see how it goes. Thanks again for the input!
Netflix online is very nice with Blockbuster having a better over selection and Redbox being good when you know you can return the movie the next day.
My husband and I recently switched from Blockbuster to Netflix. Blockbuster charges $3-4 extra to watch movies online whereas Netflix doesn’t. We love Netflix. We occasionally rent a Redbox movie when we want to watch a certain new release since not all new releases can be watched instantly online with Netflix.
I personally prefer to use some app that helps me have whatever I wanna watch right on my pc. Much more convenient and perfectly legal.
http://audials.com/en/blog/article/34/3-ways-to-legally-download-movies-and-videos-from-the-internet.html
We are going to try Netflix online streaming if we can figure out how to configure our tv and laptop to stream Netflix.
I cannot believe that anyone uses Netflix by mail, as they have the absolute worst quality control, or lack of it, that I have ever known. I have signed up with them three times, as I keep thinking that they will change, and each time about 1 out of every 5 movies are in such terrible condition with scratches, actual breaks, dirt, etc. that they are completely unplayable or stop playing halfway through. They just throw these discs up on a shelf in their distribution warehouse without checking the quality and send them right out again, even when people complain over and over again. Never again! I have learned my lesson.
For that reason, I am leery about the online product too, but we will give it a shot at the free trial and see what happens.