If you are one of the 20,000 or so Hawai'i consumers receiving a Netflix movie DVD in the mail today, chances are high that Starr Ohata of Honolulu helped send it to you.

Ohata is one of 10 Netflix employees who process DVDs from a small unmarked warehouse in the back of Halawa Valley. Until now, the warehouse gave Netflix an edge in Hawai'i.

Today, Dallas-based Blockbuster plans to announce that it will open a DVD-by-mail distribution center in Honolulu, intensifying their head-to-head competition here.

"Our goal is to provide one-day delivery whenever and wherever possible, and that's why we've added this distribution center in Hawai'i," Rick Ellis, vice president of online operations for Blockbuster, said in a statement. "We want subscribers in Hawai'i and across the country to be able to watch the movies they order through our online rental service as quickly as possible."

The Hawai'i distribution center will give Blockbuster 39 nationwide.

Netflix saw a surge in business following the opening of its local distribution facility in November 2004.

The key to Netflix's quick turnaround of DVDs to customers is the manual labor of Ohata and around 1,000 others nationwide — who repetitiously remove and insert movie discs from mailing envelopes with hand speed deft enough to be the envy of a good magician.

Those workers, plus some software and mechanical automation, have helped create the phenomenal growth in the DVD-by-mail business dominated by Los Gatos, Calif.-based Netflix.

After just 10 years in business, Netflix claims 7.5 million members and on average mails 1.8 million DVDs a day nationwide from a collection of 90,000 titles.

The company has increasingly threatened brick-and-mortar movie rental chains, namely Blockbuster Inc., which has 23 of its 7,800 worldwide stores in Hawai'i and whose DVD-by-mail service has 75,000 titles.

GOING HEAD TO HEAD

Netflix says its Halawa distribution facility provides O'ahu and Neighbor Island residents with one-day delivery, as opposed to the few days it previously took to ship DVDs via the Mainland.

Netflix's Halawa facility is one of about 100 shipping centers it has around the country. Netflix said 96 percent of customers nationwide have one-day delivery, though some movies, especially older titles, have to be shipped from larger regional distribution centers.

The addition of a Blockbuster Hawai'i warehouse will make the company more competitive. Blockbuster also allows subscribers to return online rentals to stores for an immediate movie exchange at no extra cost.

Both Netflix and Blockbuster allow subscribers to reserve movies online, charging a flat monthly fee that ranges depending on the volume of movies desired. There are no due dates or shipping fees.

ONE-DAY DELIVERY

One-day delivery means it takes one business day to deliver a DVD to the customer from when the company receives the customer's previous DVD rental, which usually takes one day. So excluding Saturdays and Sundays, a typical total turnaround time for a customer to return one DVD and receive their next DVD is two days, compared with about a week for distribution between Hawai'i and the Mainland.

Netflix wouldn't disclose how many members it has in Hawai'i, but the number jumped dramatically after the company set up local distribution.

Steve Swasey, a Netflix spokesman, said the Halawa facility on its first day shipped 958 DVDs. Now the average daily mailing is 12,000 DVDs, with a weekly peak typically on Tuesdays at 20,000.

Most of the processing work falls on Ohata and her co-workers. Ohata is the fastest "stuffer" in the warehouse. In one hour she can package 1,000 DVDs for mailing, a step that includes inserting each sleeved DVD into an envelope, removing a strip on the envelop to expose a sticky surface and folding the envelope flap closed.

Ohata's pace is one DVD packaged every 3.6 seconds.

The 26-year-old has worked at Netflix for a year, and said it took her that long to achieve her top pace. "In the beginning it was really frustrating," she said as she flawlessly stuffed envelopes without looking at them. "Even just a little bend in the envelope can make it difficult to go inside."

Swasey said the fastest stuffer among the company's distribution center employees nationwide is a woman in Washington, D.C., at 1,143 DVDs an hour. Starting employees typically can stuff 500 DVDs an hour, or one every seven seconds.

Swasey said the company has begun shifting toward more automation with a new machine capable of stuffing 4,000 DVDs an hour.

Netflix also has begun to move away from its main delivery model with an inventory (currently at 6,000 titles, up from 2,000 last year) of movies customers can watch via download on their computer. Earlier this month, Netflix announced a deal with global consumer electronics firm LG Electronics to develop a set-top box to stream movies and other programming from the Internet to high-definition TVs.

But Swasey said those new models will take time to catch on, so mailing the red Netflix envelopes will continue to be key for the company's near future — as will workers unstuffing and stuffing envelopes.

STUFFERS WORK HARD

Ohata and her teammates operate in spartan digs, a 3,400-square-foot warehouse with cement floors like Costco and white cinder-block walls decorated with movie posters.

The job requires a stamina for monotony, but pays "well above" minimum wage and comes with benefits that include a free DVD player and Netflix subscription. Also, stretch breaks every 75 minutes are mandatory.

A typical workday in Halawa begins at 3 a.m. when an employee in an unmarked white van picks up the day's load of DVDs from the U.S. Postal Service.

Shortly thereafter, the van returns to the warehouse through a roll-up door, and workers spend the next three hours or so removing every DVD from its envelope. Each DVD and its bar-coded sleeve are quickly inspected, then a machine determines which movies are to be mailed out.

Outgoing DVDs are then manually stuffed into blank envelopes, which then head for automated address label printing and sorting by ZIP code. Addresses are printed by a machine that reads the bar-code on a DVD's sleeve peeking through a slot in each envelope.

Then it's back in the van to the post office for next-day delivery.

"It's pretty straightforward — movies come in, they go out," Swasey said. "It's kind of like a swan going across the water. It's beautiful and lovely, but below there's machinations going like crazy."

Reach Andrew Gomes at agomes@honoluluadvertiser.com.