Heidi Dail and her two children, 18-month-old Asa, and Emmylou, 5, like to curl up with their puppy on the sofa, sometimes with popcorn or apples, cheese and crackers spread out on the toy box, and watch DVDs such as “Born Free,” “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” and “Mary Poppins.” When it’s just Dail and her husband, the Orono couple often checks out documentaries like “Home Movie,” a film about people who live in unusual homes including an abandoned missile silo and a treehouse.

“I admittedly use [movies] as a baby sitter,” said the 38-year-old Dail, who works as a lab technician in the New England Plant, Soil and Water Research Laboratory at the University of Maine. “We watch tons of movies.”

Among the Dails’ latest picks was the first season of the 1980s children’s TV hit “Peewee’s Playhouse” and a collection of “Schoolhouse Rocks!” shorts from the 1970s. Neither of the popular TV programs were available at movie rental stores in the Greater Bangor area. The Orono family gets all their movies through Netflix, an online DVD rental site, one of many popping up around the nation and the globe.

In eastern, northern and central Maine, movie viewers of all ages and walks of life will tell you the selection is sorely lacking for classic, independent and at most walk-in movie rental places.

“I think most stores in [rural Maine] are aiming for the largest clientele possible, so they have some selection of less mainstream titles, but not a lot. They certainly lack a whole lot of it,” said Ken Eisen, founder of Railroad Square Cinema, an independent art house theater in Waterville. “I tend to rent a lot of older films, especially westerns, and they are often hard to find.”

And for most people, DVDs are too expensive to buy. So that’s where Netflix comes in.

The brainchild of ’83 Bowdoin graduate Reed Hastings, Netflix started out with only a handful of warehouses, and just several thousand titles, on the West Coast in 1998. Since then, the online movie rental business’ subscribers have soared to nearly five million users. Maine-based users say two things – no late fees and the wide-ranging collection spanning 200 genres – prompted them to sign up for the service, which costs as little as $9.99 per month.

Blockbuster has since followed suit, offering an unlimited monthly subscription service for movie rentals. Wal-Mart, the biggest retailer of DVDs, launched a similar online DVD rental site, but discontinued it in May.

A math major at Bowdoin, Hastings got the idea for his mail-order DVD subscription service after being hit with a $40 late fee for “Apollo 13” at a video rental store in California. The simple service involves browsing Netflix’s 50,000 titles and put your picks in the “queue” or shopping basket. Within one or two business days the DVDs arrive in your mailbox in a slim slipcase. When you’re done watching the movies, you just put them in the return envelope provided, mail them off, and wait for the next batch to show up. The most popular subscription plan costs $17.99 a month for three DVDs out at any one time, with unlimited rentals.

Hastings was in Maine last summer, visiting friends in Orono, and met some of his subscribers from the Pine Tree State. He also checked out the college town eatery, Woodman’s.

“I walked around the town, thinking how great that all these people get daily mail delivery and can rent any movie they want from us,” he wrote in an e-mail. “I met one woman in Northeast Harbor who told me the year before she and her boyfriend lived in a campsite all winter, and their one luxury was Netflix.”

After graduating from Bowdoin, Hastings spent a stint in Zimbabwe with the Peace Corps before founding Pure Software in California. When his company hit it big, he donated $500,000 to Bowdoin’s math department.

“Even early on he showed the kind of entrepreneurship that he’s become famous for. He was a real go-getter,” said Bill Barker, a professor of mathematics at Bowdoin, who taught the Netflix founder. “He was in a rather unusual calculus course we had, something called self-paced calculus. It had no lecture. At one point I think after he’d finished the class he wrote us a long letter, saying basically that he liked it, and then had all these suggestions about how to change it. Even at the time he had the same sort of confidence in himself that he still has.”

Barker is not surprised by his former student’s success.

“He’s a very positive and outgoing guy – definitely a person I’d call an extrovert,” he said, recalling Hastings’ donation. “A good percentage of it helped us get some computerization, and it helped us further our computer science program”

Steve Swasey, Netflix’s corporate communications director, attributes the Los Gatos, Calif.-based business’s huge success to simplicity of use, self-service and great selection.

“Netflix has democratized the film distribution business,” he said. “Someone in Bangor has the exact same availability of titles as someone does in, say Manhattan or San Francisco. You can find really obscure movies that you otherwise would not have access to in rural areas.”

Melissa Wells, a 27-year-old Bar Harbor resident and graphic designer, agrees. She also likes the fact Netflix subscribers can register their views about films and their favorites online. From those recommendations, she and her boyfriend have watched things they wouldn’t have normally picked out.

“We got this movie ‘Metropolis,'” she said, referring to the classic 1927 science fiction drama directed by Fritz Lang. “That’s something you’d never be able to get anywhere, and I never would have watched. We use their recommendations a lot.”

The grass-roots radio station, WERU-FM, managed to stage a mini-film festival featuring music documentaries by ordering the titles through a member’s Netflix account.

“We wanted to do it over the winter in 2003 and 2004, with movies every other Saturday night at the Blue Hill Public Library,” WERU staffer Denis Howard said. “We were brainstorming: ‘How do we get these movies?’ You can’t go to Movie Gallery and get what we wanted.”

A WERU member offered to get the movies through her Netflix subscription.

“We got some great titles, like one called “Genghis Blues,” about the musician Paul Pena,” said Howard. “We got another one about the folksinger Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, and as soon as we got the movie from Netflix, his brother, who lives in Maine, said he’d come see it and speak before the movie about him.”

Michael Grillo, a film scholar and art history professor at the University of Maine in Orono, co-founded River City Cinema Society, a nonprofit Bangor-based organization that stages free evening screenings in Pickering Square over the summer and numerous film showings throughout the year.

Grillo is also a parent, and like Dail, he watches a lot of movies with his kids. He subscribes to Netflix.

“What Netflix has done is open up people’s ways of thinking about film,” he remarked. “DVDs contain so much information. With VHS, you just got the movie and the popcorn. With DVDs, it’s opened up a lot of stuff. It’s helped further people’s fluency about film, and [I] think that’s helping the cinema. People are developing a critical language that was not there before.”

Grillo, however, doesn’t think walk-in video stores will disappear whether they are chains or mom and pop stores.

“I think people will always find themselves saying, ‘It’s six o’clock, let’s go to the movie store and pick one,'” he said. “I think it just makes people want to share their knowledge of movies. People want to go to the movies, or watch them at home, and then stay and talk about them afterwards. It’s helping build a film community, and that’s extremely valuable.”

Pam Markwith, manager of the independent movie rental outlet Harbor Audio Video Rental 2 in Camden, says Netflix hasn’t significantly hurt her business. She says the local store prides itself on a good selection of foreign and classic films.

“It’s started to make an impact, but we really have quite a following,” she explained. “People may have tried out Netflix, but if you want to watch a movie right then and there, you’re going to look for something locally.”

Besides Netflix, other mail-order movie subscription services include www.dvdavenue.com or www.qwikflix.com. For independent films, visit www.greencine.com. Emily Burnham can be reached at eburnham@bangordailynews.net.