Lovefilm 1, BitTorrent/iTunes/retail 0 I've given up buying DVDs, though I haven't stopped watching them. Quite the reverse - I'm watching more movies and TV series than ever before. Before you suggest it, I'm not downloading anything either. Last year, I took out a £13-a-month subscription with DVD rental service Lovefilm.com. I can rent as many movies as I care …
Hey i use this service too and only for Blu-Ray movies, well worth the £13 a month, i must go through about 6-8 Blu-Rays a month. Calculate that out over a year, and i would never spend that much actually buying the discs. Best service out there for HD Film buffs!!
I love my DVD Rental service. I'm on the £7/month service. I can have two at home and maximum four a month. I only tend to watch one on a Friday night so that works out well. I can add an extra for a couple of quid if I want to. I've bought one DVD in the last twelve months and that was from a bargain bin in HMV for £3.
There is only one reason I can see to buy DVD's at full price and tat is for the extras. I seem to remember watching the extras on Terminator 2 many years ago. Haven't bothere since so I don't feel I'm missing out.
The only downside to the rental service is that family oriented films are often scratched to feck due to people letting their little darlings use them as frisbies.
It lacks the latest and greatest TV shows.. That's the main thing I download...
As I already pay quite a hefty amount for a cable subscription+local tv tax(which I don't mind paying at all) I consider this to simply be a different way to watch TV and I'd be willing to pay a download tax(up to some 20-30 eur though that's streching it) as well if it would mean I could use any online service
be it legal or illegal to get my content the way I want it....
I don't have vast collections... infact I have 0 shows or movies stored in any permanent form... Why bother...
I was looking at such services a while ago but they all lack in that one major field...
No fresh content only old content and even there primarily movies which come as it may
I don't care to watch...
I agree with you about the scratched disks. I had a sub when they were called screenselect. They were fine for the first three or four months then they started to throttle my turnaround on DVD's. It could sometimes take up to a week to turn a DVD around. They also sent out TV series disks in the wrong order numerous times and towards the end of my subscription the disks were often so badly scratched they wouldn't play.
Their customer services were shit. The only way you can communicate with the morons is by web forms, no phone numbers. The response time to respond to a complaint was appalling, I could pop in a support request at 9am one day and more often than not it wouldn't get answered until the next day, and often the replies were just plain fucking idiotic, sometimes it'd take 3 days to fix an issue that a simple phone call coulda resolved in seconds.
All in all I thought it was a pretty fucking awful experience and I suspect that's why they changed their name to lovefilm. Sadly they seem to rule the roost with regard to this kind of service. A mate had blockbuster's service and he found it equally disappointing.
And...to add insult to injury when I closed my account, they didn't really close the account, they made it dormant and continued to spam me with email and snail mail.
I now just rent from my local vid shop, buy what I like and steal the rest.
Paris, because she enjoys a good movie at home now and again.
I agree that this is a great idea, and for the likes of blu-ray which is becoming more mainstream it would definately be a more viable option cost wise. However as Andraž points out the key here is watching the latest and greatest content as its released and not having to wait 6 months for something to get released in the UK so you can watch it.
I don't know about these whack torrent sites that you're (not) using, but I can typically download a movie in 30-60 minutes; on rare occasions the acquisition time might exceed 2 hours, but even then, it's down to ADSL contention and/or throttling.
Perhaps you'd like an invite to a decent site? ;)
For the record, I buy plenty of DVDs. I even go to the cinema from time to time too. And I help old ladies cross the road.
I used to love services like desctibed, was early adopter of Netflix in US (San Francisco, CA). Then I moved to a country that is too small of a market for these services (Belgium). I went from a happy payer for content to a reluctant law-breaker and down-loader scum.
None of these services I could find mails to Belgium, OK, I will use my (expensive) bandwidth to download from for-pay sites. Amazon Unbox? "Sorry, not sell to your country" iTunes? Same. Netflix? Forget it...
Oh sure, I could set up a fraudulent way around this, an account maintained by a friend in the US, tunneling through another friends US ISP, send money periodically back and forth. What a pain.
Meanwhile the siren song of 'free' and 'easy' were just too powerful to resist. If the pay sites/services/media insist on making it too hard, they have only themselves to blame when us free-loading rascals pirate content (ooh! does that sound like a rationalisation? I must be one of _them_ now!!)
Former Legitimate Consumer
-Brussels, Belgium
2 minutes for a dvd quality download via torrents?? Even with a 10 mb line it take 2hrs+ on usenet to download a film. Not sure what connection you are on or sites you are using.
I certainly agree with the point made about the collecting of films. I have a fair few dvds and to be honest only ever watch a small few again. 90% I have only seen once yet like to have them on view as a show-off of my eclectic film taste.
24Mb Be subscription... DVD film comes down quite quickly :D
I am an avid collector of discs though, not sure why and it drives the missus crazy! I have looked at Lovefilm several times, but personally would prefer a less restrictive view on demand of all the latest films via AppleTV or whichever as my line speed would make that a very quick process.
But I also stream the odd movie from sites like www.watch-movies.net and even using a Dongle it's usually quick enough to stream and watch straight away. I do admit though that when I had the 3 months free they turned them around in 2 days but now I'm paying it can and often does take a week. I was out of the country for a few years so missed a lot of these series so am now catching up. As for the scratched discs, get a cheap player and they all play fine, get an expensive sensitive one and they don't. Simple!
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