Zip.ca

I love movies. All of my friends and family know this. Movies are a primary gift that I receive, it is a primary form of entertainment for me, and a topic about which I talk at great length.

When I moved here, I had to give up my long-standing Netflix subscription as the company cannot service Canada. After some discussion, my wife and I decided to try "Canada's Netflix" called Zip.ca. The results have been... amusing at best and disappointing at worst.

Zip has fewer titles overall than Netflix, but far more than any of the other online rental options in Canada. Its closest warehouse to Atlantic Canada is in Ottawa, which means that shipping estimates are off by 1-3 days on average, worse when the weather is bad. It modeled much of its site after Netflix, but some of the primary features are lacking (like popups so you don't have to leave your page to view the critical information on a movie you may want to add to your list, as one example).

The most amusing deficiencies are with its queue system and its recommendations list. Rather than partner with or lease the Netflix program for tracking, stocking, and queuing movies, Zip has chosen to create its own. Its public forums show that this is not only a bad idea, but also is one of the two most debated topics. There are even entire forum chats with subscribers suggesting ways for other subscribers to try and get more of the movies they rank in their top 10. For the years I was with Netflix, I never had to worry about that-- the fact the movies I wanted were in a queue and I was moving titles I most wanted to see into the top 10 was enough to ensure that I would usually (not always, but well over 90% of the time) get a movie from the top 10. And I had a list of well over 200 titles in my queue.

Our Zip rental history shows that we are as likely to get movies at the bottom of our queue as the top, and we have only actually received the #1 movie on our list one time. We actually had "Kung Fu Panda" as our #1 movie from its release date until about a week ago, when we borrowed my brother in law's copy and watched it. That means from November 7 through January 10, or 10 weeks, we couldn't get our #1 choice. Now, granted, it is a popular movie. But Netflix knows to order more of the big releases and keep flooding the market until it reaches a happy parity. Obviously that didn't happen at Zip as the green "availability" bar for that movie has not changed size even by a small amount since that movie was released.

At the same time, we put the 1956 James Dean movie "Giant" as our #2. It is still our #2 movie and we have yet to see it. We have received a number of films since then -- only a few from the top 10 at all -- but we can't get a relatively old film amid everyone else's cravings for the newest and hottest? We assume that Zip just has the one copy, and it has been marked as stolen or broken, and the company isn't replacing it.

Another amusing note about the queue list. We sent back a movie a little while ago and I told my wife, "I bet we get one of these three films" and read to her the names of the movies in positions 39, 40, and 41 on our list. Sure enough, we got number 40. When we returned that one, I guessed about the same area of the list. Sure enough, we got the new number 40. Our most recent return prompted Zip to send another movie out -- you guessed it, number 40 is on its way. Is Zip trying to say that none of the wide variety of movies on our list, from comedies to dramas, from new releases to movies made as far back as the 50s, that not ONE of the films from 1-39 is available to send us? I have a hard time believing that.

When my wife was coming to visit me, I would often ask her for specific movies she wanted to see. I would move those movies into the top three of my Netflix list and I would nearly always have them all within a few days and before she arrived. There is no way of doing that with Zip, unless you KNOW you are getting the title in slot 40 on your list. I found a forum post from a person who had the same movie ranked #1 for two years and counting and still hadn't received it. Another person had one in his top slot for close to a year with no luck. These are all very bad signs for the programmers of the Zip queue system and indicative of a lack of understanding of the company's main goal.

The recommendation list is just as bad. On Netflix, as you rate things with higher stars, more similar movies show up on your recommendation list. As you rate things with lower stars (or use the Not Interested option), similar movies leave your recommendation list. You can, of course, always find any movie, even one that is in a category you normally grade down. The Zip recommendation list, called "Rex Recommends" and with a cute puppy as the mascot, doesn't care what you rate something. I say this with vigor because I have rated every single TV show (even ones I like), young children's show/movie (counting, learning to read, etc.), and music-related item (especially operas, ballets, and all things country) as Not Interested. When I go to Rex right now, checking it as I write this blog, the main three things I have recommended for me are: TV shows (House, CSI, BBC miniseries, and what appear to be dubbed Chinese shows), children's programming (fun with animals, learning to draw, how to read), and musical items (Yo Yo Ma in concert, Tchaikovsky, a bunch of bands/musicians I haven't heard of). Why even have a recommendation process if you are not going to pay attention to what I like and dislike/don't want to see?

In looking at the official responses on the forums, I have found that Zip claims its estimated shipping times are based directly on the estimates from Canada Post. If that is true, it would explain why even the simplest of letters seems to take forever to arrive; if the official post office of Canada doesn't know how long it actually takes something to reach Atlantic Canada, then how can we expect businesses that rely on that information to know?

I have a few suggestions for Zip to truly become the "Netflix of Canada:"

1. Partner with Netflix and use its software. It works. Netflix has survived and flourished using it. It is tried and true and Zip shouldn't be wasting time or money reinventing that particular wheel.

2. Add software that captures the actual times/dates of movies shipped and returned and use that information, in addition to the estimates from Canadian Post, to provide estimated arrival dates. This will lead to people in Atlantic Canada knowing it will take 1-3 days longer to receive movies than it currently estimates. I say it this way because the website allows a user to provide them the actual arrival date, but it doesn't seem to use this data in any way, especially not to reevaluate the shipping times.

3. (If they do #1, this becomes moot.) Revise Rex Recommends to actually capture the Not Interested and stars selected and suggest similar movies to the four and five star ratings and not show at all those items similar to the Not Interested and one or two star ratings.

3a. In addition to this, I actually posted on the Zip forums an additional suggestion to add into our profile an area where we could select or deselect movie genres and categories and the Recommendation list would start its sort here. So for example, I would deselect Children, TV shows, and Music, and those would NEVER show up on my Recommends list. In order to see those items, I would have to do a normal search by title or person; the recommends list wouldn't have it. An official Zip representative said the company likes this suggestion and they are working to add this feature.

We will stick with Zip.ca because it is still cheaper than going to our local Blockbuster, even with the amusing difficulties. However, we have given up trying to reorder the list to get movies we want into the top 10. Instead, it will be serendipitous if and when we get something we actually want to see when we want to see it. Until then, Giant is still in our #2 position, we'll watch whatever we get and LIKE IT, and we'll buy or borrow the movies we want to see NOW.