Civic Video have updated their website, and with it comes new functionality. It’s called ‘My List’. Their explanation:

Yay! Gotta love the rapid evolution of these big chains. Lets see, they want me to log in, compile a list of movies from their online catalogue, print it out (or email it to who?), carry the list with me and then go to my store. And when I see the local now has Barbarella (but it’s out) I go back home, log on, search and find Barbarella isn’t in their system so I can’t add it to my list to remind me for when I rinse, repeat and start again.

Now *if* they could print the list out for me when I went in, or had a terminal in-store so I could check my list .. now we’re cookin! Next step, junk the shelves, get their inventory online and make the whole process seamless.

Just came across a mention of this little baby which is a HD media player. For $130 it will play HD 1080p content to your TV (via HDMI) from a hard drive source ($120 for 320gig). So, for $250 today, I can have a full 1080p HD portable playback kit.

Thats brilliant. I won’t call this a torrent player .. piracy hurts my business and I know plenty of people working in the industry that also feel the hit. I’m not talking Clint Eastwood .. it’s average joe who doesn’t make the mega bucks but piracy devalues what they do.

But .. I’d love to visit my local video store, fill my drive with pre-paid 1080p content and watch when I’m ready. Packed with DRM to limit that watch to a couple of times and prevent me from copying it out? Fine by me. The convenience would be great.

Transporter 3 is due for release this time next month. At CDWOW you can get it for a snap at $41.95, EzyDVD does it for $32.97 and JB for $29.98. Thats a $12 variance from CDWOW to JB! If CDWOW can get away with it .. that’s a huge margin they’ll make. We’re online with price comparisons at our fingertips .. I gotta wonder how many they will sell. On that price check I wouldn’t go back to CDWOW next time. Add to the craziness, within 3 months after it’s release Transporter 3 will most likely drop to $15.

Phil Sim over at Squash has written a post “Will Video kill the Internet?”. His story is one of going from a 3Gig cap to a 25gig and now to a 60gig cap. His assessment is that “for once, bandwidth advances have not kept pace with content production.”

Yes! This is close to the debate about VOD killing the video store which is one I have regularly. Here are some quick calculations on the bandwidth needed to meet your typical rental demand on a Saturday night.

That’s a lot of capacity! Lets not forget Australia is little .. blow that calculation out on a global scale, add in the capacity demands of Blu-ray style high-def and yep, Video will kill the Internet. Luckily, we’re not going to hit that demand now, the local video store will be with us for a long time to come, and in the meantime, infrastructure upgrades will ensure the threat of internet gridlock will be averted.

(nb. the youtube calc of 25 Petabytes bandwidth per month is now 2 years old .. it’s no doubt higher now)

100 seems our lucky number this month. We’ve been named 51 in the top 100 Smart Companies of Australia, as named by business mag Anthill, and just cracked the top 100 Australian Web startups as named by Technation, coming in at 84.

The Technation rank comes from web stats compiled by Alexa, Compete, Quantcast and Hitwise. I wasn’t sure we’d get into the Technation top 100, because we’re really only generating traffic out of a single suburb in Melbourne. If we get some press (eg from Anthill) we get traffic from all over (which may have caused us to pop up this month), but otherwise we’re a little different from other web startups in that we’re ‘hyper-local’. If you’re not renting discs in Fairfield, we ain’t much use to you!

What interests me is seeing our Hitwise score (which is not published publicly). This is purely Aussie traffic and more relevant to us, and reorded by Hitwise we slide up to #53. Nice one Fairfield people! Of interest in our Alexa stats, it says we get on average 7.1 minutes per day spent by people on our site. That’s great. By comparison, Bigpondmovies gets 3.4 mins/day, Quickflix 4.3 mins/day, Redbubble 5.5 mins/day, so to trump us we need to go to the mighty Facebook for 25.4 mins/day.

It’ll all change tomorrow of course …

Following up Whether or Which .. consumer behaviour does change! It takes education, and a product that people want to change for .. but of course it happens. I’ve just checked our waiting orders. We don’t open until 11am, but we’ve already got reservations for 10 discs in the queue. One was made at 10.15 last night (after we closed so the order kicks in for today), and the rest were made from 7am through to 8.30am this morning. These guys have booked their nights viewing before they kicked off the work day. Gotta love that.

Seth Godin is a permanent fixture in my feed reeder. I love his posts .. short and to the point. Always clear and concise. Whether or Which is one of his latest that just hits the spot for us. He reminds us to be clear on whether our pitch is “designed to get someone to buy any product in the category … vs. buying your product instead of the competition … “

Of course we’re pitching for people to buy our product instead of the competition .. to stop going to the local Video Ezy, and start coming to us. It’s actually a tougher gig than I thought. Video Ezy has spent the last 15 years becoming the dominant player in our industry. Over that time, behaviour becomes ingrained, routine established, comfort zones defined. We’ve popped up and are asking people to change.

For those looking for an alternative, and who can already see how broken the traditional video store is, they jump ship immediately and love us. But a lot of VE customers don’t see how broken VE really is, *until* they step into APPLEBOX, and for the first time in 15 years experience something new. They’re the people we need to mobilise, and it takes some careful thought on how to get to them.

So a new customer tonight told me she heard about us at a dinner at a friends house, one of the guests composed a song on the spot that everyone else joined in on… it was a ditty about APPLEBOX! She assumed it was about apples and was apparently the only one at the gathering not yet in the know. Come out come out where ever you are - we wanna hear that song!

Went to a gig last night at the Wesley Anne to see our Andrew play with The Road to Kilkahlia. Fantastic band, one to look out for most definitely and how proud was mother hen to see Andrew… such talent. I can highly recommend the Wesley Anne as a venue and for their two for one meals on Monday nights too!

Ok .. this might spell trouble for me .. but Mara’s on imdb, Sarah’s also on imdb. Andy’s just made the grade and gets his 6/8 thing on with his band My Lil Tornado on iTunes. Way to go Andy! But Sheeiit … I’ve got a demo tape somewhere I swear it … wonder if iTunes takes demos?