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I will never miss actually going to video stores. And I'll trade the serendipity of browsing for the convenience of reading something online having something catch my eye (such as a compilation of Roger Ebert's Top 10 lists from the '70s) and being able to put it immediately in my queue so I can't forget to actually watch the film (though with my queue it may be a few years later before I actually do so).
But then, in a video store there is never enough information provided about a movie to determine if some weird looking movie is worth watching or just a weird bad movie.
As for lost movies it has been quite a while since that happened but early on I had a huge problem with it. About 30% of the movies shipped in the first six months I was a member never showed up. I suspect that someone at Mailboxes, Etc. (Netflix envelopes didn't fit in my dinky apartment mailbox) was stealing them. Netflix has a pretty painless system for reporting discs missing and will just send another copy of the same movie or the next on your queue depending on your preference. They will eventually suspend your account if enough go missing but in the years since my initial problems I've probably had to report 2 or 3 discs a year and not heard a peep from them.
On playability I do seem lucky (or just have a really forgiving DVD player) and had only a four or five discs out of the many hundreds received that had difficulty playing and all but one of those was resolved wth some cleaning.
Nephythys, once they put it in the mail it is in the hands of the USPS so things can't be completely guaranteed. I recently returned 4 movies at the same time. They all cleared Netflix within a few minutes of each other and the next four discs all went out at the same time. The next day I received 3 of them and the fourth didn't arrive for two more days.
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