Netflix, You Need To Read This Story

Information Week has a story about a new, more scratch-resistant CD. A Colorado company called Scratch-Less Disc Industries is bringing out a CD that uses a special polymer, co-developed by General Electric, that's 100 times harder to scratch than the plastic used for standard CDs -- a resistance to abrasion similar to glass, the company claims.

Netflix, are you listening? Get with these people right away and force the studios to use this stuff for all the DVDs they sell you -- and do it before you send me one more scratched, unplayable movie and I have a stroke or something and my widow sues you for millions.Is anybody else being driven crazy by this? The public library in my town is building a sizable collection of DVDs. Blockbuster is entirely DVDs. And the condition of the disks I borrow or rent is enough to drive me to drink (not that it would take much).

It seems to have gotten worse just lately. I can't remember the last time I put in a disk and watched a film all the way through without pulling the DVD out to run it through my Disk Dr.

Actually, I lie. I can remember the last time. It was last Friday night, when "Crash" (a great film, by the way) played all the way through. It had to. It was a replacement copy from Netflix, a do-over for a copy that arrived in its cheerful red envelope DOA.

Netflix is good about the problem. There's an easy way to report a damaged disk on the Netflix Web site, and request a replacement. What there isn't, of course, is any way to get credit for the portion of your monthly fee that the damaged disk sucked up. But unless Netflix finds a way to improve the playability of its product, I predict it's going to begin suffering subscriber losses. Am I just an isolated crank, or has anybody else noticed this problem?