Online movie rental is gaining in popularity, but it’s still a short-term, imperfect solution. While we wait for technology to catch up with the far-reaching promises that we were told years ago (yes, I’m referring to broadband in every house and movies on demand), we’ll continue to see an even greater demand for online DVD rentals.

So for those who are now contemplating a decision to try an online rental house, or for those who are considering changing services, here are a few factors that you should consider in making your decision:

Shipping Facilities: so that your DVD’s arrive quickly, you will want to ensure that your movie service has a distribution center near you. This can make the difference between a 1 to 2 day turnaround, and a 3 to 4 day turnaround. This consistent turnaround time will become important to you as a user of the service so that you can plan your returns and rentals around typical viewing nights.

Movie Selection: the breadth of movie selection is obviously important. Many movie watchers are primarily interested in new releases, but you should also consider what other types of rentals are available, including TV series, familiar classics, independent and foreigh films, etc. You might even join the ranks of those who turned off cable entirely once they began using a rental service. Having regular access to series hits from HBO, Showtime, and network television is very attractive.

DVD Availability: A wide selection of movies is only one consideration — having enough copies of each title is also important. The number of copies of each movie will never be disclosed, but for the most part, the more popular the service, the deeper their selection. In this area, Netflix is generally considered to outrank Blockbuster.

Ratings and Other Information: being able to view what others think about a movie is important to help you narrow down your selection. Ideally, your service will be able to learn from your movie selections and soon be able to suggest movies to you with some degree of accuracy.

Ease of Use: as you build your rental queue and look for movies to rent, you will begin to appreciate more and more how easy a web site is to use. Looking at things like site response times, the ability to search on multiple criteria, overall site availability, information in areas like mouseover boxes, navigability, etc. will have a big impact on your satisfaction with a service. I personally find this one of the top three factors to easily rent DVD titles.

Specialized Features: each service will have characteristics that make it unique from the other services. For example, Netflix has a very convenient movies on demand section. The selection of titles isn’t great, but is still better than a swift kick in the pants. Similarly, the ability to walk into a local store to return movies or rent new ones, as you get with the Blockbuster service, are also very important to some.

Considering all of the factors above, there really are only two logical choices for a rental service, and those are Netflix and Blockbuster. To look at how each of these rental houses stacks up with each other, and to see which one’s best for you, check out the Netflix vs. Blockbuster comparison referenced below. It stacks the services up side-by-side, and can help make your decision much easier.

Similar Posts:

• Comparing the Online Movie Rental Services
• Choosing the Right Online Movie Rental Service
• Netflix or Blockbuster: Which is Right For You?
• Choosing the Perfect DVD Rental Service
• An Objective Measure of the Value of Netflix

Tags: Movies-TV

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 6th, 2009 at 12:37 pm and is filed under Movies-TV. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.