My fiancée tends to emphasize older/indieish/foreign films in our Netflix queue, so I hadn't realized that there were long waits to get new releases from the company. Hence the old blogosphere was abuzz, yesterday, with the discovery that you could hack your way to the front of the new releases line:
I decided that, if I only had new releases which had "Long wait" or "Very long wait" in my queue, Netflix would have to send me something. Otherwise, I would be paying for something that they couldn't deliver on (i.e. I pay for 3 discs at a time, but you can only give me 1 disc right now).
It may be luck at this point; however, the system appears to be working. Earlier this week, NF showed that they had received one of my movies back, so I quickly put "40 Year Old Virgin" in my queue (which also had a couple of other movies that were listed as available now). The status of "Virgin" was initially listed as "Very long wait."
As a test, I took out all of the other movies in my queue. Within about an hour, the status of "Virgin" switched from "Very long wait" to "Shipping." I got it the next day.
This actually raises an interesting issue for the long-tailers (an idea we've been skeptical of before). It was recently reported that 70%-80% of the DVD's that Netflix sends out are from the long tail (i.e. not recent), but how much of this is simply due to the fact that there's such high demand for the new stuff that people have to wait for it!? It sounds like, if physical constraints (the number of DVDs in the warehouse) weren't a factor, then there'd be more distribution of new arrivals and hits! This is precisely the opposite of what Chris Anderson and co. would predict.
Furthermore, I find it amusing that all these hip blog-folks, who should be among the core long-tail constituencies, are so excited about seeing the 40-year old Virgin a little earlier.
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