LoveFilm is one of the largest rental by post and powers a number of other brands. Very professional site with easy to use members area. Over 65,000 titles including games. FREE 1st class post, no late fees, no contracts, cancel any time. With a huge range and large number of dvd’s on new releases I’ve found the availability to be excellent. Turnaround (I’m in Scotland) was a little slow compared to some other services, but availability made up for this. I like how when browsing categories they show how many dvd’s are available, i.e. 1300+ Indian titles etc.
- Staggering selection of movies to rent
- Few real competitors
- Rent games as well as films
- Now includes downloadable movies
- Brilliant extra content to inpsire movie selection
- Includes huge selection of Blu-Ray titles
STOP PRESS! Lovefilm is now offering a Pay As You Go DVD rental system which is well suited to occassional users. Read our review of Lovefilm Pay As You Go. WITH Lovefilm DVD rental’s claim that they have ‘virtually every DVD in the UK’ and with over 65,000 movie titles (note, that includes bonus discs) on their virtual shelves, there are few other online DVD rental sites that even come close. Perhaps only Blockbuster can claim to compete on that front. We’ve tried hard over the years to catch Lovefilm out, punching in the most obscure world cinema titles we could find and, almost flabbergastingly, Lovefilm has the blinking title in its catalogue! What’s more, if for some reason you manage to find some long forgotten UK-released DVD that miraculously isnt in the Lovefilm collection, they’ll not only source it for you in days, they say they’ll send it to you first! We’ve long wanted to test this claim out, but have yet to find a title that Lovefilm didn’t stock. One of the best online DVD rental providers Despite being a monolith that has raised the heckles of more than a few disgruntled customers, LoveFilm remains at the top end of the UK DVD rental market, especially when it comes to innovation. For example, Lovefilm now allows their zillions of subscribers to create and publicly share their own ‘collections’. It’s a brilliantly simple, but hugely useful feature when you are stuck for inspiration. We especially love the official selections of certain celebrities including Matt Damon and Bill Nighy. In fact as Lovefilm becomes more and more powerful, it seems that their celebrity endorsements become ever more impressive. While this is no criteria on which to judge the service, we can’t help but be slightly impressed. More importantly though, we’re also thrilled to see that Lovefilm has listened to its customers and now offer a Pay As You Go rental service too where, instead of unlimited rentals, you simply pay for each DVD you rent. Read our full review of the Lovefilm Pay As You Go DVD rental service. Not everyone loves Lovefilm While we maintain that LoveFilm has few online DVD rental services that rival it, it is not without fault. Some users report a slow turnaround and others are disgruntled with the way they have been treated by Lovefilm’s customer services. Keep in mind though that with more customers than any other service, there are naturally going to be more complaints. Our experience with LoveFilm has always been positive. In terms of turn-around, our multiple tests of the service over the years has always been extremely impressed with the fast turnaround of titles. What has got us down most has been the availability of top titles, which – like with all other DVD rental services – remains the achilles heel of the whole business model. Fair use ‘throttling’ Heavier users should be aware that LoveFilm operates a fair use policy where the heaviest of renters will lose priority to popular titles during periods of high demand. There does seem to be a rather hazy interpretation of what a heavy user is and even some moderate users claim to have fallen foul of the policy. As we said, the other thing Lovefilm tends to fall down on at times is their availability of top choices in your rental queue. In this instance, Lovefilm are a victim of their own success – with almost a million subscribers, the mind just boggles at how many copies of popular titles they’d need to stock in order to fulfill everyone’s wishlist in order. Having said that, most of Lovefilm’s rival DVD rental firms suffer the same problem. If you want your first choice of movie at exactly the time you want to watch it, you’d be better off with Sky, Virgin Media, Tiscali TV who all offer on-demand movies, or plump for Lovefilm’s slightly pricier downloadable movies (more about that below). Now offering games rentals too LoveFilm now offers game rentals for a range of consoles including the big 5: PS2, XBox 360, PS3, PSP, Wii and just recently DS too, however they don’t offer as many titles as the more dedicated games rental services. This is fast changing though as Lovefilm continues to push its games rentals heavily. We suspect there are some sweaty palms over at the dedicated games rental services, but the fact that there are still a handful of dedicated online games rental sites who are clearly doing very well and growing steadily suggests that despite Lovefilm’s no-doubt comparitively collossal budget for promoting its games rental packages, winning over the tech-savvy and anarchic customer group of core gamers is going to be an uphill battle. Customers can choose from 4 packages that include both films and games, including the new max-4-per-month limited plan which will suit lighter users. There isn’t an option for a ‘games only’ subscription, but you can choose to rent as many games or films as you want, so if you don’t want to watch any films you don’t have to, but it’s nice to have the option there if you do. Movie downloads LoveFilm has recently started offering movie downloads, and significantly, you do not need to be a paying Lovefilm subscriber to access these films. While there are some free titles, it is essentially a PAYG service with the option of renting a download (prices vary, but are on average £2.99), or buying a download where you can burn the film legally and keep it (prices start at around £9.99). In some cases you can buy the download to watch immediately, and Lovefilm will send you a hardcopy of the film on DVD to keep. These Lovefilm movie downloads are becoming increasingly popular on the site, and Lovefilm now boasts over 2000 titles available for download. We strongly suspect this is the beginning of the end for DVDs-by-post, and Lovefilm is – once again – leading the pack.
LoveFilm get two-thumbs up for: Being the closest thing to actually being in the video shop! We also love Lovefilm’s massive title range, fast turnaround and innovative features.