Movies, Movies, Movies….

Absolutely sick of rooting through dvds in the existing DVD stores to findone dvd that might be alright, which costs e5 and I will probably bring back three days late anyway to sky rocket the price to e20 I decided to give one of those online dvd rental stores a shot.

The guinea pig : www.screenclick.com

For anyone new to the online dvd rental system basically you pay a flat fee per month and they send you dvds. When finished you simply post them back and receive your next dvd(s).

Screenclick offer four packages :

Bronze – 1 dvd at a time for e12
Silver – 2 dvds at a time for e18
Gold – 3 dvds at a time for e25
Platinum – 4 dvds at a time for e32

I started out with the bronze package and was delighted to see that the first 2 weeks are free as a trial period.

I found that there are very good titles available so, unlike in a video store where you will rent one dvd even if it is shit as that is what you came in to do in the first place, I happily went about creating my rental queue. This involves adding all the dvds that you want to see to a queue and, when you return (via free post) the first dvd received they send you the next one in the queue and so on….

This was ok and the first few dvds I received over the next couple of weeks were The Seventh Seal, All the Kings Men and Factotum. Pretty good movies overall but the wait for the new dvd was a bit tiresome especially if you only got the dvd in the post on the Thursday evening with no post on the weekend so it was taking about 6 days to send and receive a new dvd.
Thinking back this is probably perfect for the weekend dvd watcher. Receive movie during the week, post Monday, new dvd for the weekend.

I upgraded to silver (two dvds at a time) and this is when I really got my value for money out of the service. My first dvd had arrived by the time I upgraded my account so by the time I had sent my dvd back my second dvd was arriving the next day. This kept the flow of dvds to about an average of one every 2/3 days.

Also the library/collection seems very good and I have about 60 movies lined up to arrive over the next while and I have to admit that I have already upgraded to the Gold (three dvds) service since I spotted that they also post box sets (one dvd at a time) and you can pre-order future releases which is great as, although I love the cinema, there are always a number of movies that slip through the net

All in all a big thumbs up. Thoroughly recommended

PROS :
– dvds delivered to your door
– extensive collection. a dvd store can only hold so much
– free post
– a con could be waiting time but once you find the package that suits this no longer remains a factor
– no late fees
– if someone tells you about a good movie simply add it to the queue straight away
I cannot see this