Martyn Drake's Blog

Well, it’s a sad day. Today I’ve left LOVEFiLM to run into the arms of Blockbuster. You may ask yourself why, given that I’ve stood up for LOVEFiLM after I found out about Universal refusing to sell new titles to LOVEFiLM over a dispute about rental returns. Given how LOVEFiLM are Britain’s biggest online DVD/Blu-Ray rental service, and that Universal are a very big studio who are used to getting their way, I stood up for the not-so-little-but-littler-than-a-film-studio guy.

Having started to use iTunes to rent movies from Universal and getting poorer quality video encoding that I was expecting, I decided to re-examine my rental package with LOVEFiLM. I was paying £16 per month for 5 discs out at once and up to 10 rentals per month. This is was fine when Jennifer was working shifts and I was left to my own devices, but since Jennifer has a more sensible work pattern I found I wasn’t watching these films as quickly or regularly as before. So I decided to downgrade to a lower end package – only to find the LOVEFiLM web site didn’t give me any indication as to what I had done. I was still on the £16 tariff according to my account details. So I went over to Blockbuster’s web site and had a look. Had the package that I wanted, and the titles from Universal, so I decided to cancel LOVEFiLM. And that’s where the problems started.

Re-establishing my Blockbuster account was a complete pain in the arse. The sign-up process was slow with massive delays between the various stages as I waited for Blockbusters web servers to play catch-up. Then I go to enter my payment information in only to be told that the payment information was already in the system (Blockbuster had kept my payment details for another email address I had set-up with them a while back). So I had to call their customer service line to clear that up. After about 5 minutes I tried again. Slow web server once more – took 10 minutes to get to the end. Entered payment details, wait wait wait, then security details and Click Safe data. Payment gateway timeout. Payment gateway timeout. Called customer services again – spoke to the same person – who told me to try again later. Apparently there are known issues with the Mastercard gateway. Tried again after 10 minutes. More waiting, but FINALLY – it went through.

Have now added 23 titles (Blu-Ray) to the list. We’ll see how it goes. But Blockbuster really needs a better mechanism to separate Blu-Ray and DVD – it seems to assume DVD at all times unless you navigate through the Blu-Ray links. I can actually see Battlestar Galactica The Plan – although not available until May.. BAH.

We’ll see how this goes, but I’m not holding my breath. I may just give up DVD and Blu-Ray rental and just stick with going to the cinema instead. The film studios are winning. Experiencing films on local media (whether through rental or bought, and Blu-Ray is STILL too expensive to buy) or through VoD is becoming a complete pain in the arse, and I think the studios know this and are looking to get more bums on seats. The cinema is not dead, and isn’t likely to go away any time soon (which suits me fine – much prefer the big screen anyway!).