Peerflix: Trade Your Old DVDs Inexpensively
Daniel Knight - 2005.07.13
Since
the advent of the DVD revolution, DVD players have become
disposable commodities, new releases have more interesting extras,
and older DVDs have become more affordable. It's not unusual to see
B-movies on DVD for about US$3.00 these days, and
Walmart always
seems to have a big stock of US$5.50 titles.
DVDs are a great way to build a video library. Not only are they
higher quality than VHS tapes, but they don't degrade with use,
take up less space on the shelf, allow you to randomly access
scenes, and often include extras such as outtakes, bloopers, and
comments from the director and/or actors.
Some DVDs are worth watching several times, but others just
don't bear repeated viewing. And sometimes your interests change,
and maybe you realize that you're just never going to take the time
to watch those vintage Star Trek episodes again.
The question is, what do you do with your old DVDs? You can give
them away, swap them with a friend, sell them at a garage sale for
a couple bucks, or trade them in at your local video store toward
other titles, although not all video rental shops take trades.
Now there's a new option, Peerflix.
Peerflix is a peer-to-peer system for exchanging DVDs, and
although the website still bills Peerflix as beta, it's pretty well
thought out and works nicely.
Peerbux
The key to Peerflix is Peerbux, credits that you use to buy and
sell DVDs. Every DVD that you send to someone is worth at least one
Peerbux, and every DVD that you buy costs one or more Peerbux. The
more Peerbux you accumulate, the more expensive the DVDs and sets
you can afford.
There's no cost to join Peerflix. Sign up, and they'll send you
four DVD mailers. List the DVDs you no longer want to keep and wait
until someone wants them. Then print out the label (all handled in
your browser), put the DVD in the mailer, add postage, and drop it
in the mail.
Once you have enough Peerbux, you can start ordering DVDs that
others no longer want to watch. (With enough members, there's bound
to be someone who has what you no longer want - and vice versa.)
Order your first DVD, and someone will send it to you.
Not Quite Free
Continued use of Peerflix isn't free. There is a US99¢
transaction fee for each DVD or DVD set you order, and Peerflix
sells trade fees five at a time. Unless you have prepaid trades
available, you can't order any more DVDs.
Mailing DVDs, as anyone who has sold them on eBay can tell you,
isn't cheap, but Peerflix has solved that problem. Instead of
mailing the whole package, with Peerflix you only send the video
disc itself. Postage: US37¢.
If you're trading typical 2 and 3 Peerbux DVDs, your average
cost to send out one of your DVDs and receive a new one is US$1.36
- cheaper than renting a DVD, and you don't even have to drive to
the video store.
In fact, that's one way Peerflix promotes the service, as an
alternative to Netflix. Instead of paying US$15 a month to have
rental DVDs sent to your door, you pay a small fee for each DVD you
want to watch - and you can keep them forever. Or you can trade
them after you've watched them. Your choice.
If you don't have a lot of DVDs to trade, you can purchase
Peerbux for $5 each or 30/$100.
Pros and Cons
I've been using Peerflix for a few weeks, sent out seven
packaged of DVDs so far, received my first DVD, and have three more
en route. One of those is a free DVD that Peerflix gave me when I
paid my first $4.95 for five trades.
So not only is the first trade free, but you also receive a free
DVD when you pay for your membership.
The selection of DVDs is quite broad, although it currently
tends toward cheaper DVDs. But there is a good selection of newer
material and boxed sets - which leads to my chief complaint about
Peerflix.
Yes, it's cheaper to send just the DVD itself, but if you're
ordering a boxed set, it would be nice if you could obtain the box
with the set. At present, Peerflix doesn't offer that option,
although I have suggested that collectors might be willing to pay
one additional Peerbux to receive a DVD set with the box. We'll see
what comes of that.
The other drawback is that you don't have the inserts that come
with a DVD, so you have to make your own packaging. Being able to
download and print inserts for the DVD case to match your newly
acquired DVD would be nice.
Those are fairly minor negatives, and thus far I've been very
happy with the service Peerflix offers. I currently have nearly 40
DVDs available, have an extensive wish list, and look forward to
adding a lot of favorites that I don't own or only have on
videotape to my DVD library.
I wish something like this existed for audio CDs, but I haven't
been able to find a similar service.
If you have some DVDs you don't think you'll ever watch again,
look into Peerflix. It's free to try and inexpensive to keep using.
