Quickflix is continuing its partner push, having just signed up with Harvey Norman. You can read about it from The Age, here. This follows a similar deal with Woolworths back in June.

It seems to me Quickflix is experiencing the problem all Internet-only operations must solve - how the #@#$!!@?  do you get in front of customers? It’s tougher again when your audience isn’t global and you can’t grab the attention of the techcrunch, web thirsty digerati. Quickflix hasn’t the fun factor of Twitter, YouTube or Facebook, the tech geek appeal of Joost and little ‘ol Aus has only 7% of America’s 300 million - so be careful assuming what works there will work here.

It’s a challenge, and I think Quickflix is doing what it has to. But, will it work? Their DVD partnership with The Age and the SMH looks to have folded, and their service has slipped from prominence on ninemsn following a strategic alliance announced in 2005 (I can now only find them as a shopping supplier, along with ebay, dstore and a bunch of others).

My guess is Woolies and Harvey Norman are a helluva lot cheaper than ninemsn - or perhaps they have an appeal that’s good ‘ol bricks and mortar - that gives you access to customers in a way you can’t get with a pure web play?

There’s a lot of a sanity in what bb says as he finishes his post here. There’s probably something more profound with the mantra “The boiling of the ocean begins with a single puddle”, but right now the ‘Do not quit your day job. Do not do a startup’ resonates more strongly. Life certainly would be less stressful had I listened to that. I might even have a new car by now, or at least eat out without thinking about cash flow. Instead, Sare, Marg and I have just finished slotting our first 1000 DVD suspension files together. Only another 3000 to go! And then there’s 4000 DVD’s to be barcoded, scanned and filed.

But, it’s nice to finally be at the business end of this venture. I’ve got our APPLEBOX sticker on my front door now! And one on the front gate. And on my neighbour’s tool shed (I don’t think she’s spotted it yet). And on my kitchen bench. We’ve got our posters all rolled up. Flyers and magnets on the way. The green looks to be under control, and the lease is signed and we’ll be getting the keys probably on monday. Another software release will be out shortly. In under a month we’ll be trading!

Sometimes I just shake my head in dismay. Take Telstra. Resourced like no other, yet just having just visited their tv/video site, bigpondvideo.com, and using firefox on my mac, I find they put out junk that says

“This site has been optimised for Internet Explorer 6 and above. For the best experience, please view this site using Internet Explorer”.

what? They’ve got a site that looks to be entirely flash, and yet they choose to use wmv for video playback (even when there aren’t DRM requirements), and can’t get it to work in Firefox (I just tried with XP and no luck there either).

Its actually good news, because when Telstra can’t execute properly, it leaves an opening for the smaller players to get it right. And when they set the bar so low for a web experience … well, they just make the rest of us look good!

From an article last week in ITWire:

“If we are to believe ASX listed online DVD rental crowd Quickflix , the bottom is falling out of the bricks and mortar video rental business while online video rentals is a booming business.”

Now I can’t find Quickflix saying bricks and mortar is going down the gurgler, apart from standard competitive positioning to convince punters they are a better choice to renting locally. However, I do recognise the DVD rental industry is rationalising and the next 10 years will see bricks and mortar stores contract. Those left standing will emerge from a Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest battle for customers. Future strategy will also play a big part in backing the winner.

But, lets get some perspective on the ratios of postal to bricks & mortar renters. Using the article’s figures, there will be 1389 rental stores by year end. At, lets say 3000 members per store, that’s 4.1 MILLION bricks & mortar renters. Lets extrapolate quickflix’s 18,000 members (of which 2500 are on free trial) by a factor of 4 to give a total postal base of 80 THOUSAND renters Australia wide. Using my bush mathematics, that give bricks and mortar 98% of the rental market, with postal renters 2%.

That’s a HUGE gap.

Now, markets can change quickly, but renting by back-order (oops, by post) is going to need a huge transference of customers from their established rental behaviour to something completely different, before postal operations threaten the local DVD store. The threat to bricks and mortar is well established - it’s the mass merchant retail sector that has changed the rental industry forever.

Remember the fan fare last year, when jobs.com.au came online? There was a multi-million dollar media campaign spearheaded by a character called ‘Axel’. At the time I thought ok - I’ll check out the site - I couldn’t even get in because they demanded I sign up. Bugger that - I just want to look - so I didn’t. And it seems a tonne of other people didn’t either, because when I checked this morning, I find they went bust. Surprise surprise!

You can see jobs.com.au in the way back when machine, and heres their tv ad:

What a waste of money. As they say, everything is in the execution, and the jobs.com.au website failed the first basic test - just let people in to have a look. From where I sit, that set them up for failure from day one.

See that green up there? in our site header. Thats RGB HEX #49DD36, which is trying to approximate pantone 802c which is a beautiful vibrant green that Ben picked for us. Which Sarah and I both love, but since find out that pantone 802c is in a gamut range that CMYK printing can’t really cope with. RGB visuals (such as our monitors) get close, but also still don’t quite hit that pantone 802c - which btw I actually didn’t see until today, when the print guy showed me the pantone swatch. Wow - so that’s our colour huh? And we can get it printed on our DL flyers (but with a custom effort to work up from a spot colour), but not quite on the window vinyls, and the sign writer doesn’t like it and the magnets might be a touch out, and the barcode printers will have to buy different ink which will double the cost of the first print run. What joy! And to think I was just dealing with good ‘ol #49DD36.

Zeldman used to talk about making the transition from print to web - well going the other way throws a few curve balls as well!

Nothing like a marketing line huh? From the Quickflix trial signup link:

“Start your 30-day FREE trial and get unlimited movie rentals in the mail (2 DVDs at-a-time)”

Hmmm. It’s clearly impossible to get unlimited movies over a 30 day trial period. 2 movies watched per day, 2 day turnaround time (lets be generous), that’s 16 deliveries = 32 movies max for the trial. Oh all right, so if I did take up membership from the free trial THEN I could get unlimited movies. But ummm - isn’t that just like I could watch ‘unlimited’ quantities of movies if I rented from Blockbuster, Civic Video, Video Ezy and indeed, APPLEBOX?

And so what was I doing looking at a free trial from Quickflix? Well - I did give it a go! Gotta try out the competition. I’ve actually got plenty of movies myself :-), so I stopped after the month was up!

Last night, caught up with a mate who I hadn’t seen for a while. We went to Bar Lourinha - a tapas place I’ve been meaning to go to for ages. I’ll be back! They’ve got a nicely rounded wine list and great food. If you like red, go the 2006 Dehesa Gago .. and the twice cooked octopus yum. But my vote still goes to Movida. I like Movida’s layout better, they’ve got a bigger menu and choicer tapas (imo). The vibe is casual & funky, with a great wine list as well. Both places are at their best early week I reckon - go check ‘em out!

Update: Movida in Hosier Lane

Si-Mi emerged on the scene late 2006 (I think), and have received some press here, here and here. With them Melbourne based (as I am), I always meant to try and catch up - but of course time flies by and now I find their site is blank with a “Maintenance” page up. Problem is that page has been up for about 3 days since I last checked.

Their tagline ‘be seen, get paid’ underlied their user-pays model of delivering higher quality video content by paying their contributors. I hope the news isn’t bad …

Update, 15/7
The news isn’t bad at all! Si-Mi are back online with a redesigned site that’s much nicer and cleaner. Rather an extended maintenance period, perhaps a host relocation. Who knows? Good to see them still kicking around.

Hey - made the front page of Builder AU!! You can check out the article here. The lead in:

Simon Gilligan’s attempt to breathe new life into the neighbourhood video rental store, called applebox has become an unlikely showcase for Web 2.0 technologies.

The article was written by Brad Howarth. Many thanks! Brad gives incredible coverage of the Australian IT sector - from IT initiatives to go green, the state of play with VC and emergent companies through to architecture and development strategies that small companies (like me) put into practice. Its one helluva spread that pretty much guarantees a seat on any discussion panel you can think of! It’s great that Brad has an ear to the ground and is willing to speak to the small players .. one day we’ll be big gov - honest!