Word: dvds
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...latest generation, ATMs are being wired to the World Wide Web. These machines can pay insurance premiums and utility bills, print cashier's checks and road maps, and sell everything from stocks to DVDs. ATM users have bought tickets to a David Bowie concert in Iceland and soccer matches in Spain. Customers in Singapore can apply for a car title. In the U.S., Wells Fargo has installed 1,100 souped-up ATMs in 16 Western states that can show movie trailers and the MSNBC news ticker, run streaming-video ads during transactions and spit out coupons before the customer...
...world didn't exactly shake when Betsy Daly stopped going to Blockbuster a year ago, but the movie-rental giant would be smart to ask itself whether this 33-year-old San Jose, Calif., mom represents the future. Daly now pays $15 a month to order her DVDs online. They arrive in the mail in a day or two, she gets to keep two at once (for $5 more a month she could keep three), and she mails them back whenever she feels like it. "I love that the movie can sit on the counter for weeks, and it doesn...
...online service Daly uses, called Netflix, just passed the 500,000-subscriber mark, riding a boom in DVDs and discontentment with the old rental model. Indeed, founder Reed Hastings got the idea for the company when he was hit with a $40 late fee for a copy of Apollo 13 back in 1998. "If I'd returned it on time," he says, "we wouldn't be here today." Now Jupiter Media Metrix rates Netflix.com as one of the 10 busiest e-commerce sites, a list that also includes eBay and Amazon. Every day 82,000 DVDs roll through the conveyor...
Unlike DVD-delivery dotcoms back in the boom time--like Kozmo.com which spent more money sending a guy to your door than it was likely to earn on your order--Netflix uses the lightweight DVDs and the ubiquity of the U.S. mail to full effect. "Putting a DVD into an envelope for 34 [cents] and having it mailed back in the same prepaid envelope is just brilliant," says Jonathan Gaw, research manager for the analyst firm IDC. Though Netflix took a net loss of $38 million on $76 million in revenue in 2001, the young company expects to have...
Meanwhile, Netflix has a chance to patch holes in its service. Customers on the East Coast have to wait twice as long for their DVDs as those in the West, so Hastings plans to open enough distribution centers to have the whole country within a day's coverage. The recommendation service needs tweaking too: "I've rated 600 movies, and it's still telling me I would like to see Star Trek," says Kendra Jacobson, 31, of San Francisco. Still, she liked the service so much she turned her mom onto it--and both have stopped using Blockbuster...