FWIW, I live 50 miles from my nearest hub, Richmond, and >90% of my Netflix traffic is 1-day. I drop a movie in the mailbox Thursday, it arrives Friday, they ship one to me that arrives Saturday. Amazing. I know that regular mail would not be able to replicate this - no way I could mail a letter to a friend and have him write one back to me like that. It'd take a week.
Netflix has some kind of technological allegiance with the USPS that makes their movies travel faster. I remember reading about how Netflix worked with the USPS on equipment design to handle the packets.
