Tom Moertel's Blog

Netflix vs. Amazon Unbox: Netflix still wins

Posted by Tom Moertel Sat, 07 Apr 2007 16:20:00 GMT

When Amazon.com announced its its Unbox video-download service, I was skeptical. Compared to the reigning champion – the DVD – Unbox looked like a loser:

• Unbox burdened its customers with DRM and the annoyances that come with DRM
• Unbox required the use of a Windows-only player application
• Unbox movies lacked “standard” DVD features such as surround sound, alternative audio tracks, commentaries, and bloopers

The first two points were deal-breakers, so I wrote off Unbox and did my best to ignore it.

And then Amazon hooked up with TiVo. Beaming movies directly into my TiVo box eliminates the need to deal with DRM and Windows annoyances. My two big concerns sidestepped, I decided to give Unbox another look. I still wouldn’t want to buy Unbox-to-TiVo movies because they lack the typical DVD extras and would tie up storage space on my TiVo, but Unbox might be a decent way to rent the occasional movie – if the price were right.

Is the price right?

That depends on how the price of Unbox compares with the price of my current rental option of choice, Netflix. Both services offer immediate access to good movies: Unbox by on-demand downloads, Netflix by ensuring that I almost always have a DVD or two in the house.

To compare Unbox with Netflix, I had to figure out how much a rental costs me with each service. With Unbox the figuring was easy because each rental has its own price tag, typically $3.99.

With Netflix, it’s a bit trickier because the rental price depends upon how many DVDs I rent in a month. I pay a monthly fee of $17.99 and can rent as many DVDs as I want, at least until the infamous Netflix rate throttle kicks in. To determine how many DVDs I rent during the typical month, I had to download my rental history. (If you’re a Netflix subscriber, you can get your history from the Returned Rentals page.) After downloading my history, massaging it into the desired form, and loading it into R, I generated a stem-and-leaf plot to visualize the number of DVDs I have rented during each of the 76 months I have been a Netflix subscriber:

> stem(monthly.rental.counts, scale=2)

  The decimal point is at the |

   1 | 0
   2 | 000
   3 | 0000000
   4 | 00000000000
   5 | 000000000000
   6 | 000000000000000
   7 | 0000
   8 | 000000
   9 | 00000
  10 | 0000
  11 | 0
  12 | 00
  13 | 00
  14 | 00
  15 | 0

It looks like I have rented as few as one and as many as fifteen DVDs in a month. Most months, however, I rent between three and ten DVDs. On average, I rent about 6.4 DVDs per month:

> summary(monthly.rental.counts)
   Min. 1st Qu.  Median    Mean 3rd Qu.    Max.
  1.000   4.000   6.000   6.408   8.000  15.000

Thus my average rental price is about $2.80 per DVD:

> 17.99 / 6.4
[1] 2.810937

Now I can make my Unbox-vs-Netflix price comparison. For me, it looks like Unbox is about 40 percent more expensive than Netflix:

> 3.99 / 2.81
[1] 1.419929

So the price of Unbox is not right, at least for me.

Testing Unbox-to-TiVo rentals

Because Amazon is offering free $15 credits to TiVo owners, I decided to give Unbox a test drive. My test rental was The Illusionist. Renting the movie was easy (just one click), and shortly thereafter Unbox automatically downloaded the movie to my TiVo box. When I played the movie, however, I was disappointed with the video quality. I easily noticed banding artifacts, which were distracting at times. On the whole, the viewing experience was inferior to watching a DVD.

Netflix still beats Unbox

For me, then, Unbox is still a loser. It costs more and delivers less than DVD rentals via Netflix.

A note to my friends at Amazon.com

I would be happy to give you my business, but right now you’re not earning it. If you want me as an Unbox customer, here is the recipe for winning me over:

• Let me easily download movie rentals to my TiVo. (Check.)
• Offer true DVD quality or better. (You’re not there yet.)
• Sell the rentals for less than $2.80. (You’re not there yet.)

Until then, I’ll have to give my money to Netflix.

Cheers,
Tom

Posted in reviews
Tags amazon, dvds, movies, netflix, rentals, reviews, tivo, unbox
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Mini-review of CafePress's direct-printed t-shirts

Posted by Tom Moertel Thu, 06 Jul 2006 03:48:00 GMT

As you may recall from a previous post, I set up a CafePress store to sell LectroTest Robot–branded stuff such as t-shirts, hats, mouse pads, magnets, and so on. CafePress does a good job of making their products appear to be of the highest quality, but I am naturally skeptical about such claims.

In particular, I wondered about their t-shirts. The results of their heat-transfer printing process – previously the only option – did not make me happy. Images with transparent areas revealed the transfer background, which over time yellowed and made the image seem to float on a sea of urine.

So when I set up The LectroTest Emporium, I specified the use of CafePress’s newer “direct-printing” process for t-shirts, hats, and every other product for which it was offered. Still, I wondered about the quality.

So I ordered up a LectroTest Robot t-shirt and put it to the test.

Test one: the eyeball and the scanner

When the t-shirt arrived, my initial impression was that it looked pretty darn good. The Robot came out perfectly, and even the pointy parts of the LectroTest lightning rendered without problems. The colors were true, if a little less saturated than I would have preferred.

Compared to silkscreen, the direct-printing process seems to produce results that are a bit less saturated and a bit less crisp. It’s like an airbrush artist rendered the Robot onto a billboard-sized shirt that was carefully shrunken to normal size.

Next, I threw the t-shirt on a flatbed scanner. The results are below. The first image is an overall view of the Robot logo. The second is a 300-dpi close-up of the lettering, where you can see the air-brush effect.

Test two: the iron

To check for color offsetting, I turned the shirt inside out and ironed it on a full-steam, cotton setting. Throughout the ironing, the face of the front-side image was pressed into the white cotton of the back side of the shirt. Nevertheless, none of the ink migrated. The pure white remained pure white.

Test three: the washer

For the final test, I washed the shirt on a normal warm/cold cycle with a small load of other clothes. I then dried the clothing on a medium cycle. (CafePress recommends washing in cold water and drying on low, but nobody pampers their t-shirts like that, and so I tested under more typical conditions.)

When I took the shirt from the dryer, I didn’t see any signs of shrinkage or fading. To double-check, I ironed the shirt and threw it back on the flatbed scanner.

Doing a before-and-after comparison of the scans in the Gimp, I was able to see some shrinkage and fading (see image below). Top to bottom, the shirt shrank by about 4.5 percent; left to right, the shirt actually grew by about 1.8 percent. Minor fading was apparent, especially in the solid black areas. Neither the shrinkage nor the fading were concerning, however; both are typical for t-shirts, especially on the initial washing. The bottom line is that the shirt’s coolness was untarnished.

Summary

It’s a good t-shirt. It looked cool out of the box and fully captured the metallic fierceness of the beloved LectroTest Robot. The shirt handled a hot-steam ironing without any ink offsetting. It shrank and faded a bit on its initial wash, but neither change detracted meaningfully from the shirt. In sum, CafePress’s direct-printed t-shirts seem like the real deal: they look good and stand up to typical wear and washing.

Posted in reviews, perl, marketing
Tags cafepress, lectrotest, reviews, shirts, t
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