DVD Rental Article Discussion

kedj

Going to try these myself and think its worth a mention for occasional use. Buy a book of 12 Blockbuster rental tokens for £11.85 in vouchers (x 4 = £47.40 full value). Vouchers valid for 6 months and can be used on game rentals too.

musician11

I hated LoveFilm and so joined Amazon DVD free intro trial which worked fine. However, just looked in my Amazon account and noticed that LoveFilm seem to have bought Amazon's scheme too!! What a stitch up! Is there no escape from LoveFilm? :mad: Don't Amazon know how many people don't want to give their business to them?

mrviner

When it says "unlimited" it really means limited by how many back&fourths Royal Mail and the rental company "librarian" are able to process.

I'd like to know how many DVD's it's possible to get through assuming you watch the DVD(s) the night you receive it(/them) and send back the next day?

(I'm with Amazon, but any company experiences would be interesting.)

codger

mr viner / musician: Well, talk about synchronicity. . .;)

I'm just about to downgrade my Amazon "unlimited" account because it's not worth the subscription. I used to have the cheapest option -- four DVDs per month; one DVD at home per time -- but switched to the "unlimited" account with one DVD at home because it seemed to represent a good deal.

It isn't.

I've just gone on-line now to downgrade the account because in the past month I have received no more than four DVDs. Yet I've theoretically paid for many more.

Is it Royal Mail? I doubt it. The service I received was always prompt when I had the 'budget' account, yet after upgrading it suddenly, and curiously, deteriorated.

For example: a DVD was sent back to Amazon a week yesterday by 1st Class Mail. Amazon emailed me to say it had received it last. . . Thursday.

On Saturday, Amazon emailed me to say it had despatched the next DVD on my list. Today is Tuesday, the morning post has been delivered. . . and there's no DVD.

So the last DVD my wife and I watched was on Saturday, February 23rd and here we are on March 4th, still awaiting its replacement. No delay has been caused because of the nature of our rentals list; we have 20 titles listed and the first 10 are marked 'available'. Equally, no delay has ever occurred at our end: we watch a DVD on the evening of the day we receive it, then post it back to Amazon first thing next morning.

Sadly, reporting the "problem" only exposes the blatant fatuity of Amazon's current fault tracing system. I've just clicked to report the non-arrival on March 4th of a DVD sent by 1st Class Post on Saturday March 1st and the options are, bizarrely, identical: tell Amazon that your DVDF hasn'tarrived, and the answer is:

It can take a few days for your DVD to get back to Amazon.co.uk. Please allow four business days before reporting a disc lost by sender


Complete gibberish. I'm reporting the non-arrival of something from Amazon to me. Not the non-arrival of something from me to them. Amazon must know there's a difference yet chooses not to correct this fundamental error, and so provides a well-nigh identically worded explanation for two quite different situations.

Anyway. I'll stick with Amazon only because nothing would ever persuade me to deal with a company like LoveFilm.

My views on LoveFilm are pretty well known so I won't repeat them here.

However, just to clarify the position for musician and anyone else here:

As of today's date, LoveFilm has not, repeat not, acquired Amazon UK's DVD rental by post business.

Whether it will ultimately do so remains to be seen.

Platinum_Horse

We are with Blockbusters service, and I have to say I think they are brilliant!

If I send a DVD back Monday. I'd have my next film by Thursday. I always figure the DVD takes 1 day to get there, 1 day to process and post out next DVD, another day to arrive. Sometimes sooner if I get the first post of the day.

In terms of service - they have been great. A couple of films have been lost in the post - which we informed them about, and they re-sent those films to us, no questions asked.

The only downside has been a few scratched discs (we have DVD player which is very fussy, but my old PS2 plays anything!). But if you mark a disc as scracthed or faulty, you never receive an apology - where as when borrowing instore, if that happened, we'd get a replcament and a free extra rental!

My main gripe is if you send back 3 films at once, they'll post you back 3 films in 1 envelope, which is no good if you then watch a film a day over the next 3 days, wanting to post each one back after wtaching it - although you can request more envelopes.

We pay £15 a month for their 3 dvd's at a time, unlimited service. And I'd recommend them.

In terms of No of Films per month, last month, we had 13 DVD's posted to us.

codger

That rate of despatch / return far exceeds our experience with Amazon, platinum.

And if you consider what you're getting for your money -- 13 DVDs in a calendar month for £15 -- that's superb value: I tend to calculate the base price of the cheapest DVD rental as £2 a time, so at minimum you're picking up £26sworth of viewing for £11 less.

Blowed if I can figure out the percentage 'discount' there but it's, er, a lot.

If Amazon's DVD rental business is acquired by LoveFilm then I probably won't be the only Amazon customer looking for a new home. On the basis of your experience, Blockbuster looks good.

(The only caveat is that I don't know how Blockbuster compares on low volume accounts: we've now dropped back to 4 DVDs per month, 2 DVDs at home at any one time, for which Amazon's fee is £6.99p per month.)

skibster

We've tried Lovefilm (awful!), Amazon (slow turnaround and now owned by Lovefilm), and Blockbuster (pretty good, but started sending only movies far down on list).

I'd like to try Blockbuster again in a month or so; has anyone figured out how many movies you can take out on an unlimited plan before they stop sending you your top selections? If you're a high-volume user, after a month or two they basically start to ignore your top 20 choices, even the older films. Can you get away with 4 a week, or 5, before you get relegated to poor service?

codger

skibster: LoveFilm hasn't yet taken over Amazon.

It's by no means a "done deal". . .

Wolfsbayne

I prefer lovefilm to my moviestream which is just awful. Have recently tried a free 3 month trial for returning triallists at lovefilm but they dont seem to want to validate my card details, waiting for an email response as to why.

Platinum_Horse

It helps us that I get to watch at least a DVD a day to/from work now (as I got a portable DVD player for my b'day) We've been with Blockbuster DVD by post for about 3 years now, I'd say, and we've always received films within the top 5 of our list as far as I can remember. But this is the first time we've used them at such high volumes. FWIW Jan we had 12 films but previous months we'd fluctuate between 5-8 a month.

As we don't get to the cinema now, I won't be too bothered if they start dropping down my list of films when choosing which to send me! I'll let you know if this does happen though. Although having said that i'm always adding to my list anyway and have got about 200 on there:eek: