Call it a bit of serendipity after nearly a decade of business, but it turns out the two-billionth video disc rental made by Netflix in early April was a Blu-ray title. The firm's latest milestone was apt, perhaps, not because it happened on April Fool's Day but since it's been trying to grow its Blu-ray rental business in the past year and recently announced a new pricing structure to deal with Blu-ray subscribers.
The two-billionth rental involved a Blu-ray version of a romantic comedy, "Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist," which was mailed to a Netflix customer in Birmingham, Ala. (That transaction would have involved the firm's Atlanta distribution center, which is one of nearly 60 mail-out depots now operating throughout the United States.)
Netflix says about 10 percent of its overall rentals currently consist of Blu-ray titles among its 10 million subs. And while it has put a lot of emphasis on instant streaming of some of its titles from its Web site to computers and (via a variety of set-top boxes) directly to TV sets at no extra cost to its customers, the company projects its disc-in-the-mail rental business—both standard DVD and Blu-ray—will not peak for another several years.
Netflix said about 1,300 of its estimated 110,000 titles are now available in 1080p Blu-ray. And while it doesn't exactly rank up there with government bailout numbers, "2,000,000,000" is still a lot of rental discs.
