Comparisons of UK online mail DVD rental services: my find..

Hi,

I have been testing a number of mail rental services in the UK, since the
beginning of June, and I thought I would share my findings. I was using each
time their trial period (usually 30 days), so I would expect the service to
be particularly good during that period.

Ranking by DVD ratio (number of DVDs received per day on average during
trial period):

Top
0.79 - eChoice
0.79 - MovieTrack
0.78 - LoveFilm

Average
0.72 - DVDs365
0.65 - Blockbuster

Poor
0.47 - ScreenSelect

Comments:

ScreenSelect: the results were very poor with ScreenSelect. When contacted,
they obviously blamed the Post Office, but I was running a trial with
MovieTrack and eChoice at the same time, and it was fine with them. Many
times, the DVDs would not be sent the day the previous ones were received.
It's a shame because ScreenSelect website is very good in term of
functionality. Additionally, a number of DVDs supposedly lost when returned
to them... I did tell all of this to their customer service, but they did
not provide further replies.

Blockbuster: they mainly have new blockbuster movies (as you would expect),
so not much luck with older classic movies or foreign titles. They had some
serious issues with the queue during my trial. My queue had more than 25
movies (mixture of old and new movies) and I kept receiving emails saying
that they couldn't find anything available in the queue! It didn't happen
with any of the other companies.

eChoice: they used to be quite expensive compared to the others, but now
their price is more in line. The site itself is quite poor compared to
others, so don't expect to get some help for ideas, but very good delivery.

MovieTrack: good service (including customer service) but price not
competitive (their two DVD package is almost the price of three DVD package
with some competitors).Only offers 2 DVD at a time during trial.

DVDs365: good service. Only offers 2 DVD at a time during trial.

My conclusion: I have subscribed to LoveFilm for a number of reasons: good,
consistent delivery; good price (£19 for 4 DVDs); good site (with many
example lists to give advice); good range of movies (including foreign);
movies received so far were from the top of the queue.

Best to avoid ScreenSelect and Blockbuster in my opinion.

Hope this will be helpful for some people...

Regards,
Tom

On Sun, 8 Aug 2004 11:31:40 +0100, "Tom" <Tom DeleteThis @nospam.com> wrote:

>I have been testing a number of mail rental services in the UK, since the
>beginning of June, and I thought I would share my findings. I was using each
>time their trial period (usually 30 days), so I would expect the service to
>be particularly good during that period.

Well, there you have it. Most, if not all, deliver a good service
during the trial but dump under par once you start paying for the
service.

I've been using the online services since last Christmas and went
through quite a few, some of them I used as a paying customer
(Screenselect, I Love Film, DVDs365, QFlicks) and all of them are not
able to give a satisfactory service for a longer lenght of time.
Best one I used was DVDs365; I stayed with them for 4 paying months
but everything started to go wrong at the same time: wrong disks, a
lot of damaged disks, a ridiculous amount gets lost and it takes them
about 2 weeks to agree on this (which meant that I had only 7 discs I
wanted in the last month on a 3 DVD subscription)
The same thing happened with the others but much sooner.

Now, I'm with Blockbuster, Moviechoices (both paying) and both are
fine, although Blockbuster is probably on it's way out very soon.
I now subscribed to a 30 day trial on eGlobal.

So, unfortunatly: it seems there is no "best choice" at the moment