Online movie rental is growing in popularity, but it remains a temporary, flawed solution. While we wait for technology to catch up with the far-reaching promises that were made years ago (that’s right, I am referring to instant movies via the ubiquitous broadband promise), we’ll continue to see greater and greater demand for online movie rentals.

If you’re one of the many people who are contemplating signing up with one of these rental services, here are a few characteristics that you might want to keep in mind as you make 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.

DVD Selection: the breadth of movie selection is obviously important. Many movie watchers are only interested in new releases, but you should also consider what the inventory of TV series, classics, and movies from the past two decades is like You might be surprised to find yourself turning off cable because you can rent all of the best series from network television, Showtime, HBO, and more.

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.

Usability: as you build your rental list and look for movies to rent, you’ll start to appreciate more and more how easy a web site is to use. Looking at things like the ability to search and browse, ease of navigation, response times and availability of the site, etc. will have a major impact on your satisfaction with a service. I personally find this one of the top three factors for online DVD rental.

Reputation: you’re probably aware that two services dominate online movie rentals (Netflix and Blockbuster). But what you might not know is that there are plenty of other niche providers like GreenCine for independent movies, DVD Empire, and other smaller providers. Unfortunately, many of these smaller services are smaller for a reason: they just don’t stack up to the two big guns. To avoid any painful experiences, you should probably stick to the known entities.

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