We joined LoveFilm a little while back, because we found ourselves in our local movie rental store every few weeks renting four movies at a time, but wanted something a little easier and more accessible.  It’s taken a few months to get used to the service and initially I was disappointed.  Not really unhappy with the service (which is excellent, 1 or 2 day turnaround on films), or the price (which works out better for us than what we were paying locally), but that it didn’t seem to fit with how I actually wanted to watch films.

They send you a random disc off your list, we have 2 lists and get 2 discs at a time.  But sometimes I wasn’t in the mood for that film and it sat there for a week or so unwatched.  We ended up using one list for TV series and Grete is ploughing through Scrubs at the moment and it works really well for that.  You add the series to your list, they send you a disc when you send one back.  The other list we use for films, but I was still struggling to work out why it wasn’t as good as I had expected.

A few days ago it finally dawned on me.  When we joined, we’d been through a period of watching quite a few things in the cinema, renting a lot of stuff, and buying a few DVD’s.  There wasn’t anything recent that I wanted to rent, we’d seen them all.   We’d also bought a whole load of cheap stuff from Amazon to fill in our favourite movies (like WarGames, Goonies, etc.) so we didn’t need to rent those either.

Now that a few months has passed, there have been plenty of movies on in the cinema that we didn’t go and see, and quite a few new releases coming up, so I’m more excited about the service going forward.  The turnaround is really quick, it seems like good value if you watch as much as you can and the website is okay.

I don’t think physical movie rental stores can survive much longer, and when LoveFilm finally get their digital delivery system in place for everyone and I get some way of linking my PC to the TV, it’ll be the final nail.  I’ve now got about 16 items on my main movie list reserved for when they get released over the coming months, and I’m looking forward to them arriving one disc at a time, through the door, with no effort.

LoveFilm has a referral scheme, if you were thinking of signing up, this link gives you a one month free trial and I get a bonus.  I didn’t write this post to get referrals, I’d been thinking about writing something for a few weeks, but if you were thinking about signing up, I won’t turn down more referrals.