Webware

Coming soon to subscribers of Blockbuster Video's Total Access service are video game rentals. On Wednesday the company announced it would be adding gaming titles alongside movies to its movies-by-mail monthly service as part of a pilot program.

This program will start in the second quarter of this year, and will only be open to a limited number of subscribers. The company hopes to have it available for everyone else by the "second half of the year."

Worth noting is that Blockbuster is making a notable distinction between the value of films and video games in its brick-and-mortar stores. Subscribers of the Total Access service currently get a handful of free in-store movie rentals each month, whereas for game rentals the company will simply be offering them at half price. Such movie and video game rentals are subject to due dates and late fees however.

Regardless, this program is an important step for Blockbuster, which Yahoo Finance recently put on its list of "15 Companies That Might Not Survive 2009." By offering video games only in its stores it was getting direct competition from a number of other games-by-mail services like Gamefly, Numbthumb, Gottaplay, and user swap site Goozex. This move also gives it a wider content offering over rival Netflix, which has been receiving much attention for getting its streaming service in a slew of new consumer entertainment devices.

Virtual Worlds Management, a company that provides research on the growth of online virtual worlds, said $594 million was invested in 63 virtual worlds during 2008. Gaia Online and PlayFish were two of the most prominent recipients of venture funding during the year. That said, investments in virtual worlds declined as the year wore on. In the first quarter of 2008, virtual worlds received $184 million in funding. By the fourth quarter of that year, investments dropped to $101 million. Virtual Worlds Management expects a further decline in funding in virtual worlds during 2009.

Fuzz.com, a social-networking site for musicians and music lovers, announced Wednesday that it's being forced to shut down, effective February 13. According to a blog post the company's founder placed on its site, Fuzz will close because of "increasing operating costs and flat revenue." On February 13, none of the site's accounts or content will be accessible.

Community presentation provider SlideShare has announced that its users can now embed YouTube videos into their Flash-based presentations. According to the company, its old policy of forcing users to include links to outside videos simply wasn't working, so allowing them to embed YouTube videos seemed appropriate. Although its software now works with YouTube, no other video services are supported.

Online video applications, platforms, advertising networks, and related services incurred $494.7 million in revenue in 2008, said AccuStream Media Research. That amount is nearly 87 percent greater than 2007 revenue figures. Even better for the online video market, the research firm believes video revenue will increase by 41 percent in 2009 and 38 percent in 2010. The amounts were based on reported revenue figures from video overlay applications, advertising platforms, CMS platforms, and other video-related services.

HomeAway, an online vacation rental marketplace, announced that it redesigned its hallmark site, VacationRentals.com, Wednesday. According to the company, the revamped page features enhanced property details and an interactive photo flip book to get a better view of prospective locations. To celebrate the launch, the site is offering a "Family Fun Giveaway" for vacationers who wish to book a trip to Florida. Through February 26, travelers will be automatically entered to win 80 prizes from the site, which range from $75 gas cards to a family four-pack of passes to Disney World and Kennedy Space Center.

If you've ever wondered how much you're costing Netflix when you go on those month-long movie binges, you should give Feedflix a go. It takes any one of your personal Netflix RSS feeds and figures out how many movies you're watching per month and what the cost comes out to for each DVD. It also breaks down your biggest return days and how long you tend to keep titles.

Ultimately, most of this information is useless, as with some simple math a Netflix membership tends to end up costing less per-rental after just four DVDs based on the most popular plan. Where you get the value is by coming back a few months later since it keep tabs on your RSS feed over time. You'll then have a better analysis of your watching habits and know if you if you need to get out of the house more often, or if it's time to ditch Netflix altogether.

What makes the service truly interesting is its graphs of other Feedflix users. It will group together this information and anonymize it, giving you a bit of a peek into other people's habits. There are charts of the average rental period, popular plans, and most frequent return days. However, the neatest one of the bunch is the breakdown of other users' queue sizes. According to Feedflix, about a quarter or more of users have queues in the low hundreds which is truly impressive. I'd be very interested to see how this data stacks up with subscriber information from the source.

Feedflix is completely free of charge, however you will need to be a Netflix subscriber (or friends with one) to make use of its data crunching prowess.

FeedFlix does a pretty good job at helping you figure out your rental habits, you just have to set it up with your RSS feed and it will keep tracking you over time.

(Credit: FeedFlix)

The people have spoken: Netflix will not be eliminating user profiles, the account feature that lets you split movie rentals among separate queues for a household. The company had announced the removal of profiles earlier this month, much to user dismay.

"As someone who enjoys helping his 4-year-old daughter manage her one-DVD-at-a-time, G-rated sub-account, I identified with these thoughtful pleas to maintain Profiles," a Netflix product manager identified only as "Todd" wrote on the company's blog. "Because of an ongoing desire to make our website easier to use, we believed taking a feature away that is only used by a very small minority would help us improve the site for everyone. Listening to our members, we realized that users of this feature often describe it as an essential part of their Netflix experience."

When Netflix opted to eliminate profiles, the company said that the feature was only used by a small sliver of its member base. It was a vocal sliver, however, and a thread on customer service forum Get Satisfaction revealed a host of angry users, ranging from families who wanted to keep parental controls on separate queues for their children to spouses who didn't want to bicker over disparate film tastes.

With members threatening cancellation or--shudder!--a switch to troubled rival Blockbuster, it clearly wasn't a great move on Netflix's part. Response to it had been overwhelmingly negative, and the company clearly got clued in.

For the past two years, my roommate and I have split a Netflix user account, mostly so that I don't have to deal with his trashy action-movie picks mucking up my queue of navel-gazing Wes Anderson knockoffs, and so that we can ensure a clean split in our four-at-a-time subscription. He'd totally hog it otherwise.

But starting on September 1, we're going to have to suck it up. The rental-by-mail service announced on its blog on Thursday that it would be doing away with separate user profiles on the same account.

The reason, the post explained, is that it's a little-used feature that some people found complicated: only a percent of Netflix members use it. "We will do our best to find better ways for families to share accounts than the existing profiles feature," it read, "and will continue to invest in improving the Web site experience in many different ways."

So maybe a new kind of split-household account is on the way, but for now, my roommate and I are going to have to either share a password (which could raise security concerns for some people) or pay for two separate accounts (which will cost more for both of us). Customized recommendations will be directed to both of us rather than our individual accounts, which means--eek!--that I'm going to see Meet the Spartans recommended to me instead of Flight of the Conchords.

Lousy move, Netflix.

A thread on feedback forum Get Satisfaction revealed that other people aren't too happy either. Some raised concerns that they could no longer operate separate queues with parental controls for their children, and others expressed plights similar to mine--they share accounts with roommates or housemates who have vastly different cinematic tastes.

"Way to go, Netflix, I'll just be canceling the service at this point," one user wrote. "I specifically upgraded to the four-at-a-time service to split out the queues for my wife and myself. I'm not going to pay for another separate account."

And if you've been using separate Netflix profiles as a way to cloak your porn habit (or chick-flick habit) from your spouse, get ready. You'll have some explaining to do come September.

When I was a college student living on a lowly work-study salary, few things angered me more than shelling out dough for a required course book, only to have the professor assign a single chapter for reading. (It's been 10 years since I took the class, but I still remember fuming as I paid $30 for 30 pages in From Max Weber.) And don't get me started on science textbooks that cost hundreds of dollars but only net you a few bucks once the class is over.

Online textbook rental service BookRenter wants to ease at least this part of a student's financial pain. As the name implies, BookRenter will rent you a textbook for a set period of time, with the option to extend your rental or even purchase the book as the return deadline draws near. If you choose to return the book, the company provides a prepaid UPS shipping label to minimize the hassle.

The site itself is attractive and easy to use, and I was able to find books from various disciplines in the catalog just by searching for the title. Unlike most used textbooks, BookRenter titles are shipped in new or like-new condition. Of course, the flip side is that you have to return the books in the same condition or face damage fees. (The site will eventually start renting its used-condition books, as well.)

While other textbook rental sites only offer rentals by quarter, semester, or summer, BookRenter offers multiple rental periods--30, 45, 60, 90, or 125 days--with the price set according to how long you're keeping the book. Even if you're renting books for the whole semester, BookRenter's rates are competitive with similar sites. For example, the Max Weber book I mentioned above costs $12.93/semester from BookRenter, $12.98/semester from WhyRentBooks.com, and $13/semester from Chegg (formerly TextBookFlix).

In a perfect world, of course, all these textbooks would be available as digital downloads for you to consume on your preferred reading device. But until that day, you might as well free up some beer money by renting the textbooks you don't need to keep.

Update at 6:15 p.m. PDT to add areas that may likely see delays in delivery.

Update at 7:55 p.m. to reflect that the site has since come back online.

Netflix customers expecting a little red package soon may be disappointed.

The largest online video-rental service has suffered a technical glitch that has knocked out its Web site as well as its logistics and delivery systems, according to a Steve Swasey, a company spokesman.

The malfunction, the source of which the company won't reveal, began at about 7 a.m. PDT. The site came back online about 12 hours later, but the malfunction caused Netflix to miss the deadline to mail a large number of shipments scheduled to go out on Monday--affecting customers across the United States, according to Swasey. "We did send some shipments, but most of them will go out on Tuesday."

Swasey declined to specify what percentage of the company's more than 7.5 million customers would be affected.

The blackout was the second longest in company history. In July, Netflix suffered an outage that lasted longer than 18 hours. On that day, the company's shares fell 7 percent as the market punished Netflix for a drop in customers.

This time, the glitch came as Netflix's customer numbers are on the rise and its stock is soaring. Stock analysts upgraded Netflix on Monday, and the company closed trading at $38.18, up 5 percent. Over the past six months, the company's shares have doubled in value.

One of the differences between the two outages is that Netflix's logistics and shipping systems were not affected in July. With the more recent glitch, Netflix continued to ship DVDs but that changed sometime Monday afternoon.

(Credit: Screenshot of Netflix HTML source featuring deleted sentence)

In a message posted to its site, Netflix told customers not to worry because the company's "distribution centers are still sending and receiving DVDs." A check of the site's HTML source showed that the company rendered that sentence invisible sometime later.

"Our engineers have been feverishly working on repairing the problem all morning," Swasey said. "It was an unanticipated, unplanned outage, and we apologize to our customers."

Site outages are typically not a big deal, and any company can suffer one. But a blackout that lasts for more than an hour is rare, and one spanning several hours is rarer still.

Netflix, which has 7 million subscribers, said that customers needn't worry about their stored movie picks. None of their information will be lost.

The long-anticipated set-top box from Netflix is headed toward your living room this summer, according to several major news providers including the Associated Press, The New York Times, and Reuters. The good news is that unlike the optical supremacy battle going on between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, the capability to tap into Netflix's movies-on-demand service could become a standard option on many upcoming consumer-level DVD players and set-top boxes as an added feature--not the sole purpose. Boxes equipped with the Netflix service (including the purported next revision of LG's flagship BH series of dual HD-DVD and Blu-Ray players) will be able to tap into Netflix's on-demand service that streams movies without having to wait for the discs to arrive in the mail.

There's no word on price, exact release date, or the inclusion of an a la carte rental system similar to Vudu or the one that's rumored to be coming to iTunes and Apple TV later this month, but based on Netflix's existing model, it looks like the company is trying to help take a step out of getting on-demand movies on the TV from the PC for people who don't want to shell out for a media extender, or other streaming device.

In addition to LG, Netflix is reportedly making deals with other hardware manufacturers to get the streaming service bundled in upcoming players and game consoles, although with Microsoft already having its own integrated movie rental marketplace, the chances of adding a competing product on the XBOX 360 are slim.

The folks over at HackingNetflix have a purported screenshot of the main menu from LG, although no screens of the video selection or settings menus. Expect more details next week at CES.

I'm a big fan of selling things through Craigslist, which is why a pitch from a service called Zilok piqued my interest. The premise of the site is that you can make money by renting stuff you've got laying around the house instead of parting with it once and for all. For folks who have something like a $500 Dyson vacuum that you bought and use once every six months, this service could theoretically help take a chunk out of the original purchase price by letting you rent it out to people who live near you.

The service works by letting users set up their own rental contracts and charge based on time. For instance, say you're renting out your snowboard. You can charge by the day, and whoever decides to rent it agrees to do so for X number of days. Like Craigslist, the buyer and seller can link up via e-mail and meet up locally to make the transaction. To avoid getting hosed by someone stealing your stuff, you can also set up a deposit via PayPal, which people can pay up front and get back once the rental is over.

See when an item is ready to be rented or out with someone else with the calendar.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

While it's got a lot in common with Craigslist, Zilok leans more toward eBay in terms of member and item management. There's a built-in map to help you see where items are not only when you search for them, but also on each item page. There are also ratings and feedback to help the community separate the good from the bad. My favorite feature though is the calendar, which will let owners note when the item is not available for rental, or being used by other Zilok users.

I'd like to see Zilok launch an API that could be tied into CRM services, or at least partner with a site that offered them. Many of the items on Zilok are already rented out by businesses. While it's basically advertising for the time being--considering most rental services likely have their own tracking system and Web site--it's still an effective way to put rental items online with a built-in rental mechanism.

The company is based out of Paris, France. With its U.S. launch, there are only 11 included cities, and less than 100 items have been added to the service thus far. The site is completely free to use until 2008, which would bear some significance if we weren't less than two months away. After the New Year, Zilok is applying a system similar to eBay with per-item posting fees, although once an item is on there, you don't have to pay again even if you continue to rent it out.

Related: Couch Surfing

See what's close and what's not with Zilok's map. You can also browse by categories and tags.

(Credit: CNET Networks)