Originally published on: 2/7/2006 7:41:01 AM
I went and checked out their selection and setup to see what they had. It looks like a great start to the kind of video library that's been hard to get access to. It includes stuff ranging from how to weld to understanding and building fuel cells to Photoshop techniques. In short, it goes beyond the HowTo videos that most places carry into the stuff you usually find in the back of Popular Mechanics instead.
That's actually the source of one of the problems for the site, which is price. Many of these types of videos, when you buy them, are priced at $80 or other arbitrarily high price points due to their narrow market. So, when a place like this decides to rent them, they've got much higher costs per DVD than do places like Netflix. So, you can expect to pay $10 per rental.
Their second strike against them comes with the 1 week rental period. To watch a 2 hour comedy in a week, sure. To watch "Building Fuel Cells" enough to be solid on the material in a week? No way. Now, this can be sidestepped by a bit of gray area technology (think DVD-R or DivX), which I would generally never recommend publicly, even if the copies are for private use. But in this case, I'd hate to see this kind of service disappear just for this one reason or have people avoid it because they don't have enough time. I'd recommend that they just extend the rental period beyond that to reduce the ethical dilemma a bit. Incidentally, they say that many of the videos themselves are on DVD-R or DVD+R, indicating that in many cases, you couldn't buy them outright easily if they weren't available for rent through the service, further complicating the ethical dimensions.
I ordered 3 myself to see what you can expect and I'll report on what I see. I got one on knitting, one on making molds and casting and one on, ironically enough, making instructional DVD's. That covers a pretty wide range of what's available and should give a pretty good gauge for whether I want to use the service further.
The list of available titles definitely makes me want to watch quite a few of them. I'm just hoping that their business model of $10 and a week to watch doesn't sink what is a promising idea.
What I'd actually suggest is, since many are DIY productions on DVD-R is lowering the rental price and letting people *buy* their copy for a bit more. If the rentals were $5 and I could buy the copy I just watched for $10 more, if I wanted the information, I would buy it. These videos are just the kind of thing you often want to refer back to. Anyone who's ever watched one, gone into the garage, and an hour later stared at a pile of materials that wasn't coming together as easily as it had looked knows the feeling of wanting to see it again. Often, that 2nd (or 9th) viewing gives you that little detail you missed the previous times. However, now that you've nearly severed your thumb, you noticed the info that will preserve your digits.
As it sits, they're putting up obstacles to customers handing over money, which is always a dangerous thing to do in business. You should always make it easy for the customers who WANT to pay for your product to be able to do so in a way that makes sense. When they use circumvention, it's usually because the defined path isn't serving their needs in some way. I'm not going to say that you can always fix this, but if you can move the defined path to more closely match what they're after, you'll do much better.
I'm the founder and president of Technical Video Rental. I found your post via technorati. Thanks for taking the time to comment!
I started the company a few years ago because I wanted to learn about metal lathes, and thought that it was a shame that my only option was to buy an $80 video. Since then we've grown to a half dozen employees and we offer thousands of titles in over one hundred areas from several hundred vendors.
I'd like to address a few points you raised above:
1) we'd absolutely love to get the cost of video sales down, and get in the business of reselling these videos as well as renting them. We've done a lot of brainstorming abut a rent-to-own plan. Right now the instructional video market for these fringey sort of hobbies is very fragmented and home-grown, which leads to a lot of the vendors selling their titles for $80 because they think it's their only way to make a profit. TVR is trying to prove to these vendors that the market is a lot wider than they realize, and their total profits might be higher at a $20 price point than an $80 price point. A key step in this demonstration is exposing these hard-to-find specialty offerings to a much wider audience...which we're doing via the ads in Make, Popular Mechanics, etc.
Our growing presence in this market for the last three years has already shaken things up, and increased the visibility and sales of a lot of our small vendors. We expect this to continue in the future. The market is developing in a lot of interesting ways. Perhaps one of the best results of this is that a profitable market for videos means that more specialists are getting interested in authoring their own videos!
2) We are very serious about copyright, and can not condone any copying of videos. Please remember that the vast majority of our vendors are small business people, and need to eat!
3) We are very flexible on the one-week policy. Many folks have written from time to time and asked "May I have another 3 days?" and we almost always say "sure, no charge!". Additionally, we chose to offer free shipping on ALL order sizes, so if you want more time with the videos, you can always order one per week, instead of three at once. Sure, it costs more to ship, but we eat that extra cost, and you get more time with the videos!
Your final paragraph is a great one: like you, we absolutely abhor obstacles in the way of people getting stuff done, and we're always very happy to hear feedback about how we can do things better. If you, or any of your readers, have suggestions, please contact us. I take several hours every night to read all customer feedback personally, and I will consider every suggestion we receive.
Travis Corcoran
President, Technical Video Rental