Tag Archives: lovefilm

Loved Film, but not LOVEFiLM

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Just cancelled our LOVEFiLM subscription.  For a couple of reasons.  Firstly we’re getting Sky HD+ and due to the way LOVEFiLM works by the time they sent us a disc, you could already pay a few quid to see the film on Sky+ anyway.  With Sky HD+ it means I’ll be able to watch HD versions of the films and get just as good a quality experience.  The second reason is that despite letting you rank your selections as low, medium and high, LOVEFiLM consistently didn’t send me my high priority choices, probably because they were in demand.  That’s okay, but what’s the point of having the system if high demand films just ignore it?

We only managed to get what we wanted to watch by micro-managing the list of movies, and if I have to do that, personally, I may as well spend 10 minutes walking around our local Blockbuster picking up 2 or 3 films to watch.

I still think that online rental is going to be the way to go – either as digital delivery or physical delivery, but until you can log on, click ‘I want this’ next to the film and get it in the post in 2 days (rather than having to micro-manage a list of 30 films and always getting the low priority ones) I’m not sure it’s going to be good enough for me.

The true measure of irony?

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I’m a LoveFilm subscriber and I wanted to rent Public Enemies.  However, it’s not been available on LoveFilm since it was released, always listed as just unavailable for rent.  Keep that in mind.  I have four lists on LoveFilm, Movies, TV, Wish List and Comedy.  Movies are stuff we want LoveFilm to send right now and likewise TV is the list we use to get the next disc in whatever TV series we’re watching.  The Wish List and Comedy lists have no discs next to them – so LoveFilm doesn’t dispatch anything from those lists.  They’re reminders of things we might want.

Back to the first point.  I wrote to LoveFilm to ask them why they didn’t have Public Enemies.  They replied and said they were having issues with their supplier, sounds like bollocks but okay, fair enough.  They also said, here have a free disc! Cool I thought, although let’s face it, it doesn’t cost them any money.

So I checked, and there was no sign of my new disc allocation.  And I waited.  I wanted to put the new disc next to the Movies list so they sent something to watch.

Later that day I received an e-mail telling me they’d dispatched something, but it was something from the Wish List.  Disappointing I thought.  Because I was sure you were supposed to be able to pick where the free disc came from, and I assumed I’d just missed something.

Anyway, I sent them another mail to thank them but say that it was a little frustrating that they had dispatched something without letting me pick the list, since the Wish List they used isn’t something I wanted a movie from right at that moment.

They replied, they were very sorry, to compensate me for my trouble they had given me a free disc!

Which I had no way of allocating to a particular list that I could find.

And so they dispatched something else I don’t really want to watch from the Wish List.

I believe this, my friends, is the true definition of irony (in combination with a battery powered battery power checker they make a wonderful couple).

LoveFilm – online movie rental

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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.