TEAR, SLAP, CLACK.(The Talk of the Town)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 28-AUG-06

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COPYRIGHT 2006 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

Shortly before sunrise on a summer Tuesday, a truck left a warehouse in Rockville, Maryland. It travelled a mile to a post office. The driver backed up to a loading dock, where fifteen mail carts awaited him. The carts were stacked with boxes of those ubiquitous red pre-paid envelopes, containing DVDs addressed to Netflix. Before 1998, the only option for renting videos was a local store with a few thousand titles. Today, Netflix, as a delivery system, is almost as ingrained as the mail itself. Five million subscribers select movies online, watch them at home, send them back, and pay monthly fees: $17.99 a month for the most popular plan (three at a time, at home or in transit).

By the time...

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