Netflix worked this way years ago. You could go to their site and click "I have returned this movie" and they would go ahead and send you the next one.

Maybe they just needed the magic mailbox!

Yes like the above poster that is how they used to work, it was amazing, but nowadays they don't do it. I heard that they do have scanners at some mailing facilities, i am not sure where i heard this but it was somewhere, you know out there. It is sad, i just sent them email asking to bring back this service/feature last week, it is such a small world.

I am sure you have heard of the contraversy relating to they don't mail movies out as fast as they can, they hold back if you are a long-time subscriber, but if your a new-account they send them out as fast as possible. this is a newbie ranking system, maybe i should just cancel and open my account every 2 weeks to keep them on their toes. Luckily they have a disribution center in Tacoma, so up here in the NW the wait time is a little less as long as the movie is in that distribution center.

Here is another great idea, find a way of having the movies go peer-to-peer instead through netflix, that sounds like a more geniotic idea then yours, cause you could get real foul ups if it is broken, plus you would have to invent and design a "re-sealable" and "re-addressable" envelope, think of the repercussions, and not to mention the privacy issues. ok my copy of X goes to Y who is living in texas, and you would have to know their address, it is too much work and probably not as efficient unless you restrict it to geographic region.

problems aside, this is a very familiar topic where you send paper-backs all around the world, i remember it was a community of shareing paper back books through the mail, only you could do this with DVD's when the costs go down, maybe in 20 years they will start doing that.

Or they could allow you to lend 2 DVDs so you can schedule watching and mailing...

I subscribe to Zip.ca, a Canadian equivalent to Netflix. They are still doing what you describe, and it works entirely on the honour system, as long as you have been a subscriber for a few months and you don't abuse it. Maybe Netflix had too many abusers.

I use Blockbuster online, because every month you get 2 in store rentals included in the plan. I read somewhere that they have a deal with the Post Officee where it gets scanned and the information send to Blockbuster so they can mail the next. For me, that doesn't happen, but then I'm not surprised.

Ivan, Netflix actually allows you to check out 3 movies at once so normally you could overlap (unless you hit the Netflix slowdown). I should have clarified that we are sharing one Netflix subscription among the family so I have one queue for myself and the other 2 rental slots are used by my wife and kids. Netflix handles this well where I have my own queue and my returns trigger the next movie from that queue.

Brian, it did occur to me that someone is probably trying to make this work with a heavy technology solution (scanners in the post office etc). My idea was to make it sort of low-tech (if you can describe using a cell phone to take a picture and email it as low-tech these days) where there is no heavy infrastructure in place connecting back to Netflix (or Blockbuster etc).

- adam

On the gaming side of things GameFly does this with their games. This is called "FastReturn" which is a partnership that they have with USPS. Once the post office gets it scanned in they will send you the next game in your que. Of course they do not have the speed of Netflix in actually getting the next game to you but at least you know it is on its way.

Well, the peer to peer thing could easily protect privacy. But what we really need is a smart Postal Service. Imagine a USPS that worked on a service model and that adopted smart scanners that would read the barcode and take the necessary routing steps. They would get this from reading web services at the company sponsoring the mail.

So with Netflix, they prop a web service that takes in the barcode, decides what to do with it (send it from me to Bob in Texas, send it back to distro center, etc.) and slaps the appropriate label on it. They'd have to adopt some better packaging...easy enough. This smart scanning would also speed the process of me getting a new movie because Netflix would know sooner that they had "received" their movie. It's all about web services. Who's on board...let's go do it. :-)

I used to subscribe to Netflix's service. I cancelled it because I thought I was not getting enough value. For about the same price per month I can go to Hollywood Video and buy 3-5 previously viewed DVDs for about the same price as a monthly subscription. It is a little more (depending on the current inventory level and how desperate they are to get rid of them) but I do get to keep the movies and I never have to return them. :)