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The Consumerist has an article in which they theorize that the reason Netflix charges more for Blu-ray rentals may be also because that Blu-ray discs tend to break more easily (as well as the higher cost of Blu-ray movies in general).
It quotes a Netflix subscriber that claims that he has received three of these damaged discs, which have small cracks on them, in the last few weeks when he's only ever had one bad DVD in his entire rental history with Netflix.
Some of the people commenting on the article also claim to have experienced this, while others say they've never had a problem.
Blu-ray discs use a special hard coating that is supposed to make it less prone to damage, although from my experience, it does seem to make the disc a bit thicker and less flexible (which may be a good thing, or a bad thing, in terms of cracking). The real problem with Blu-ray discs is that the special hard coating cannot be "polished" like normal DVDs (or HD DVDs) to fix scratches and such, and so once that coating is damaged, the disc is useless. That's the theory anyway, I'm not sure if it is really like this in practice.
Whatever the case, it's more reason to head towards digital delivery and away from physical media, once they get the bandwidth issue sorted that is (and not just in the US or high tech countries like South Korea or Japan, but in technological backwater places like Australia too).
Read the original Consumerist article here:
It quotes a Netflix subscriber that claims that he has received three of these damaged discs, which have small cracks on them, in the last few weeks when he's only ever had one bad DVD in his entire rental history with Netflix.
Some of the people commenting on the article also claim to have experienced this, while others say they've never had a problem.
Blu-ray discs use a special hard coating that is supposed to make it less prone to damage, although from my experience, it does seem to make the disc a bit thicker and less flexible (which may be a good thing, or a bad thing, in terms of cracking). The real problem with Blu-ray discs is that the special hard coating cannot be "polished" like normal DVDs (or HD DVDs) to fix scratches and such, and so once that coating is damaged, the disc is useless. That's the theory anyway, I'm not sure if it is really like this in practice.
Whatever the case, it's more reason to head towards digital delivery and away from physical media, once they get the bandwidth issue sorted that is (and not just in the US or high tech countries like South Korea or Japan, but in technological backwater places like Australia too).
Read the original Consumerist article here:
