Monday, December 04, 2006

Nicheflix disappoints

I'm disappointed with Nicheflix. They are an online subscription rental service, modeled after Netflix, which specializes in multi-region DVDs. I rejoined three months ago in order to rent the British DVD release of the Farscape TV series, season five, but I quit them. Nicheflix lets you add movies to a queue, and the queue shows the status, whether long wait, short wait, or even "out of stock." Well, I added Panic in Needle Park, which was available, but then it became out of stock. Unrelated to that, they sent me an email telling me that they are selling some surplus DVDs on eBay. Much to my chagrin, they were selling Panic in Needle Park on eBay, even though it is in my queue as out of stock! Even though I contacted the eBay seller ID about it, they never replied. I contacted Nicheflix directly. They never replied. Therefore, I am posting this.

My feeling is that they are pulling out of the subscription rental business by selling off their stock. Well, if they are going to do that, they shouldn't be accepting any more subscriptions. They took my money under false pretenses.

Nicheflix has another store, called Nicheflix a la carte, where you can do short-term rentals of individual DVDs for a fee. That store seems to be growing. They are still adding more titles to their inventory, although much more slowly than at first. They don't have Panic in Needle Park.

2 comments:

  1. I've been thinking about joining subscription Nicheflix one last time, but I hate it that you can't see disc availability before signing up. There's only a handful of titles that I'm interested in, and they've removed the 2-out plan that I liked so it would be a $25 gamble.

    Incidentally, I've spotted several DVDs on their eBay auctions that, AFAIK, never were available for rental from either section of the site - stuff that I'd have been very interested in.

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  2. It's too bad they're getting out of the business. It was a good option. I hate having to buy non-region-1 titles just to watch them only once.

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