If you've been dying to unload some of your old DVD box sets, Peerflix has a proposition for you: a new Website where you can swap your old DVDs with others.
"Our research shows that 95% of consumers who own a DVD-player also own at least one pre-recorded movie on DVD, with 68% of them having more than 10 DVDs at home," said Peerflix co-founder Billy McNair, announcing the new site which launched March 8.
"That collection, however, can quickly lose its entertainment value and the residual worth is too low to justify selling it. We recognize this situation, and offer DVD owners a new solution to get the maximum value from their DVDs: Peerflix members can trade DVDs they own and no longer want for DVDs they would like to watch. Our recent funding validates the viability of the business model we built, and the community that has developed as a result."
McNair's co-founder, Danny Robinson, said Peerflix melds the power of communities and decentralized peer-to-peer models. "(We) make the DVD by mail experience truly scalable and economically viable," Robinson said. "With Peerflix, every household in North America is a potential distribution center."
This isn't the first time McNair and Robinson have teamed up: they previously created Spinway, which provides e-commerce and private-label ISP solutions for top brick-and-mortar companies. Spinway has since been bought by K-Mart's e-commerce division, BlueLight.com.
But Peerflix isn't the only new DVD distribution or redistribution model on the cyberblock. EZTakes has launched a service where you can download movies to your personal computer legally and burn them onto discs. Four major Hollywood studios back online download service MovieLink. And Akimbo Systems, another startup and one believing the studios are only halfheartedly supporting MovieLink, has launched a set-top box letting you accept and play back movie downloads on your television set.
And Netflix, one of the kings of the online mail-order movie world, is kicking itself forward to the future: They've been working with TiVo to build a movie download store, while Napster—formerly the granddaddy of P2P, now a pay-to-play online music store—is working on a video service to complement their music store.
