Online DVD rental

With the subscription to WoW now officially on hiatus I decided I would test the waters with these crazy new online DVD rental services – for those in the dark you pay a fixed monthly fee and you can rent as many DVDs as you like – you get to keep so many at home (usually 2 or 3) and you get new ones when you return them.

I was torn with which one to go with originally. Blockbuster was the
obvious choice as they offer a good deal. Worth noting here is that
Amazon suck – it isn’t unlimited rental, even their big package only
lets you rent 6 per month. However I ran some searches to see choice
and Blockbuster was pretty much beaten.

Problem is there are a lot of films I want to watch that aren’t mainstream. I ran a search for a few items (some of them stuff I have I just wanted to search range) – American Graffiti, THX 1138, So Little Time as well as others and the results showed quite a different so I decided to go with Screen Select.

I was slightly skeptical of them. Before I would have gone with them although their customer service didn’t get a great write-up. My experience so far hasn’t been so bad. I phoned them once and the person I spoke to was fine. The system was down so she took my details and phoned me back which was good.

The selection is pretty decent; I managed to hit 70 items on my list. Dispatch wasn’t fast though. Although they offer one day turn-around to members it is slower for new customers – two business days. I registered Wednesday night and they failed to get them out by the end of the week so they weren’t displayed until Monday (ie, today).

I had around 6-7 things on high priority, the three they sent me were all on that list. That said there is no priority system other than a high, medium, low so you end up with lots of things on each priority levels rather than being able to order exactly. Also, when you add stuff it automatically goes onto medium priority so a lot of the time I had to go to my selection page and change it.

Of course the true test of the experience will be yet to come. The three disks they have dispatched to me are scheduled to arrive on Wednesday (I was hoping they would come tomorrow, I could maybe watch one and mail it back so I get the next one before the weekend). No doubt I will be blogging about my experiences later.

Timeline

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This entry was posted on Monday, May 9th, 2005 at 2:05 pm and is filed under Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.