Ryan McFarland

Peerflix sent out an email to members yesterday…

Effective April 23, 2008 Peerflix is discontinuing the Marketplace and DVD buy/sell/trade portions of Peerflix.com. While the Peerflix.com web site will be available beyond April 23, 2008, you will no longer be able to buy, sell, send or receive DVDs on Peerflix as of that date. While we have made considerable investments in our marketplace platform over the past four years, unfortunately the escalating costs of operating the marketplace do not make that business viable at this juncture. As we move out of the DVD marketplace business, we are focusing our energy and resources on building the Peerflix Media Network which is now the web’s fastest growing vertical movie network.

The Peersafe Protection Program will also be terminating effective April 23, 2008 meaning that you will no longer be able to make any Peersafe claims starting April 23, 2008. So, if you have DVDs that you have been holding on to but were planning to send at some point, now’s the time! If your Trade Cash account balance is greater than $10 and you would like to cash out your remaining Trade Cash balance, you must do so before April 30, 2008. To request a cash out of your Trade Cash, please log in to Peerflix.com and click “My Account” in the upper right corner, then click the “My Cash” tab and then click on the “Request Cashout” button and follow the indicated steps. As of April 30, 2008 you will no longer be able to request any Trade Cash payments from Peerflix and your Trade Cash will immediately expire and be forfeited. All cash out requests remain subject to the terms and conditions set forth in the Peerflix Service Policies and will be charged a $10 processing fee.

Peerflix was neat because you could trade your DVDs in by sending them to someone that wanted one and then you would have a credit to request one. At first postage was paid by the person mailing the disc but eventually the fee for postage was added to the exchange fee and it was included on the “envelope” that you printed out to mail the DVD. Eventually they moved from a 1:1 ratio for exchanges to a dollar value associated with a disc. If you sent one to someone then you were given a credit based on the price of the disc. If you bought one you would use your credit by requesting a movie. They allowed people to cash out their credit if you had over $100 accumulated. I have a $34 balance which i can now cash out for $24. So long Peerflix.

At first Cena and i used this system to trade in movies we had but didn’t want any more for things we did want to see. (If we couldn’t get any value out of selling them on Amazon of course.) Then when they shifted away from Peerbucks (or was it Peerbux?) and to a true dollar value we saw that we could make a little money by shipping things off but not requesting any. We set notification rules for our yahoo email accounts that whenever we had a notification that someone wanted a movie on Peerflix then yahoo would send us a text message. Plenty of sleepy mid-night scrambles to try and claim a movie to send off before other Peerflix users claimed it. It is time to pull the movies i have listed on Peerflix and move them to Amazon (one which was formerly worth only $3 was now worth $13) or pass them off on friends.