How I Save Money Using NetFlix & RedBox

Using NetFlix & RedBox To Save Money

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I am obsessed with watching and collecting movies – and it was becoming financially impossible to maintain my habit of buying every new release that came out on Tuesdays. When I got my PS3 and Blu-Ray came into the picture, the average $15 I was paying for new releases rose to a whopping $25-35 depending on the version you purchased. And that was at my favorite store in the world, Bull Moose Music.

I Needed A Cheaper Way To Watch Movies.

I built my collection to over 600 movies, and realized I was watching many of them only once, and some of them are still in the wrapper. When I took on a job that drastically cut my front-end earnings every month, I had to pinch every penny I had to keep up.

My Main Needs

Quantity Of Movies… I need a wide selection, as wide as Amazon.com’s dvd sales search.
Quality of the movies – I could download them from the web illegally, but the quality is often shit and the downloads take too long.
The Ability To Play On My TV – and I preferred not to have to rig my computer to do it.
Cost Effective – Pay Per View is at least $3 a movie, no matter how old it is. That’s silly.
New Releases The Day They Came Out – this was a tough one. The only guaranteed way I could find is to buy them.

Netflix Solves The 4 of 5 problems. Redbox Handles The Rest.

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Reasons I Love Netflix

Movies, even the 3 hour long epic Braveheart, start within 5 seconds of clicking the play button. I assume this may vary by connection speed, but I’m on a regular cable modem.
The have The Office season 1-4 available 24 hours a day streaming.
I can stream to my Xbox 360. You can also use almost any existing TIVO machine, Windows Media Center and Netflix-brand boxes ($99) to stream to your television.
You are allowed 6 unique devices. This means you can let your friends or family use their Xboxes or computer or any other device to stream to their homes. This also means you can get help paying the bill.
Their movie delivery is always overnight, since day 1. I don’t know if I live near a delivery location, but it’s awesome.
I can have up to 8 out at a time. For people who like to record movies, this is one hell of a way to collect a lot, cheap. Not that I condone or participate in this behaviour.
The movie quality is often HD, otherwise perfect normal clarity. On a TV you can’t tell the difference, and HD is true HD.
I sent in a movie that they did not receive. I figured I would have to pay for it, but nope. It literally says “this happens from time to time. no prob – here’s a new movie”. I assume this is a once in 6 months thing, but still, very, very reasonable and no phone convo or argument needed. Good job guys!
Their ‘We suggest this movie‘ engine is awesome. I ignored it, being a macho ‘I will pick my own movies thank you very much‘ knucklehead. However I kept seeing them suggest movies that I did love alongside movies I hadn’t seen. So I watched a suggested movie called ‘Primer‘. I was hooked on their suggestion engine after that.
There’s a TON of children’s stuff, including season after season of Dora The Explorer and Diego… If I had a nickel for every Dora episode watched, I wouldn’t be working, that’s for sure.

Supplement The Lack Of New Releases On Netflix With Redbox Online Reservations

Netflix is never stocked with enough copies of movies to maintain the demand on new-release day. And the fact that you have to wait until Wed or later, have to time your queue deliveries so you have a slot available for a new release, and have to deal with behind the scenes throttling by Netflix’s queue priority script, you need another solution for that ‘Tuesday Movie Obsession’.

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RedBox – Make Use Of Online Reservations

RedBox can be the perfect solution to getting new relesaes the day they come out. If you have on near you, just login to their website and reserve the movie you want at the location closes to you. If you do this any time before 6am on Tuesday, you have a really good chance on getting the new releases that day! The best part? $1 per movie!