Netflix is great. The only sand in the cogs is the post office at times. At some point, bandwidth across the country will get to the point of supporting downloads en masse. I imagine Netflix could transition pretty easily albeit with the DRM hurdle to jump over.
Yes--we try to isolate them so they don't go through machinery (we have a package sorting area and place them in trays there). Sometimes they do go through machines and the envelope part comes off--very rarely. I think Blockbuster Video and some other companies do similar borrow-through-the-mail
setups. (For awhile there was Clean Films which offered
sanitized versions of movies but copyright/rights attorneys
pretty much shut them down...
(from last July: "Matsch ordered the companies named in the suit — CleanFlicks, Play It clean Video and CleanFilms — to immediately stop producing, creating and renting out the scrubbed films.
"We're disappointed," said Ray Lines, the head of CleanFlicks. "This is a typical case of David vs. Goliath, but in this case, Hollywood rewrote the ending. We're going to continue to fight.")
You're right, the problem sometimes is the post office delivery time. I mailed 2 dvds MOnday, hoping I can get 2 new ones Wednesday, before Thanksgiving so I'd have something to watch at my sister's, While Netflix shipped 2 new dvds on Tuesday, they didn't arrive Wednesday.