Itty Bitty Rants

Infrequent posts about stuff.

A Tale of Two DVD Rental Services

Back in April I procured an Xbox 360, and decided that instead of paying the exorbitant amount of money for single games that I would sign up for a rental service that would, in the end, be cheaper. I’ve been a member of Netflix for several years and find that it works really very good, except that they do not have games.

I looked around and finally decided on Intelliflix for 2 reasons: They were cheaper than everyone else by a few dollars, and they also had movies including an entire class of videos that Netflix doesn’t carry.

Before I get to my experience with Intelliflix, you should know how Netflix has been working for me. I’ve been on the 3-out plan for several years. When I finish with a movie and put it in a mailbox, they receive it the next day and ship the replacement movie, and I receive the new movie in the mail the second day. On very rare occasions (probably 4 or 5 times a year) it will take up to 5 days to receive a replacement, and even then only 3 or 4 instead of 5. I’ve probably sent back 6 movies that were unplayable for various reasons and only ever had 1 that was broken on arrival. In short, it has been well worth the monthly subscription and I heartily recommend it to anyone. It’s great.

I think the best thing that I can say about Intelliflix so far, is that it does not cost quite as much as Netflix. It takes a minimum of 9 days turn around after putting an envelope into the mail to get something new, and in the 2 months since I started my membership I have received exactly 1 game title and that wasn’t even an Xbox 360 title. The opportunity to view so much, ahem, alternative cinema has been nice but it is not the primary reason that I signed up for their service and I’m starting to get annoyed.

Their website is slow, poorly designed, exceedingly buggy, and really likes IE best. The ratings system is a chore and barely functional. The queue display and interaction is infuriating. They do have one nice feature in that I can mark one of my movies as “in the mail” so they can send out a new item early, but even then it takes up to 3 days (not including weekends) for the next item to be shipped! If they had a decent distribution system in place they would not even need that feature in order to make their system at least somewhat tolerable.

It is possible that if you live within 1 day mail turn around of Framingham, MA you will have a better experience with their service, since as far as I can tell that’s where they keep most of their movie stock. The closest distribution center I have seen so far is in Michigan. Anyone living outside of the Eastern Time Zone, as far as I can tell, is completely out of luck for reasonable service.

At this point I’ve decided to give them another month to see if things improve, and somewhat purely out of curiosity to see if I ever receive an Xbox 360 game, but I am reasonably confident I’ll be canceling at that point. If you are looking for a service, I would suggest looking elsewhere first.

If anyone has had better service from GameFly or any of the other services that rent games, I’d be glad to hear about it.