a review of the PeerFlix DVD trading service.

PeerFlix is attempting to take on the movie rental business by providing a peer-to-peer trading service for DVDs. The idea is simple, add a list of the DVDs you no longer want on their site; create a list of the discs you’d like to get, and then PeerFlix matches you up with other members that have done the same. You then mail each other the DVDs in PeerFlix provided mailers. The movies traded are yours to keep, and there’s no limit to the number of trades allowed per month. For this service PeerFlix takes $1 per trade — paid by the recipient.

They bill themselves as superior to NetFlix since: you pay as you go, there are no $17/month charges, and the movies are yours to keep. PeerFlix is currently offering 1 free DVD, so I signed up for the service to test it out. In the process of creating a list of about 10 movies I’d like to get rid of, and 50 I’d like to receive, I ran into several problems. Ignore the fact that their servers sometimes return a bad pages — causing frequent page reloads, and that the servers seem overloaded — returning, “Internal Server Error” several times during my testing; the biggest problem was that the selection of available movies is awful.

To their credit, PeerFlix provides “credits” for movies traded; based on amazon prices a credit seem to represent approximately $9. So your The Soprano’s season 1 set won’t be traded for a Wal-Mart $5 bin special. But $5 bin specials seem to be almost all that is available on the PeerFlix website. Most people seem to be trading in low quality bargain bin movies, you would end up with several mediocre movies in exachange for your Soprano’s DVDs. The real issue I have is that PeerFlix is only providing cheap, unlabeled mailers for the DVDs. Members are expected print a shipping label, place the label and DVD into the mailer, and add $0.37 postage. The mailers consist of a simple paper envelope, similar in size to the NetFlix ones, and a paper DVD sleeve — no provision for including booklets or the hard cases DVDs normally come in.

That last part is a deal breaker for me; I have no interest in owning a bare disc stripped of the packaging. This would be even more true of multi-discs sets of movies; Peerflix lists several 6+ DVD box-sets, but their mailers have no provision for even sending 2 DVDs with or without packaging. Furthermore, $0.37 postage might be sufficient to get one disc to it’s destination, but certainly would cause problems if used to send several DVDs. While this might be just my issue — I am a compulsive, obsessive movie collector — PeerFlix does not seem ready for prime-time.

PeerFlix has sent several e-mails notifying me that I have movies to send, even though they haven’t provided the mailers to send them. My package of mailers arrived yesterday, and included only 2 mailers, even though I was promised 4, and need 3 to fulfill existing disc requests. Add to that the fact that the (1 credit) free DVD I was interested in when I signed up still has not been sent by the owner, and it all adds up to a bad experience for this movie hound, and a questionable service in general. Thanks, but I’ll stick with NetFlix.