lovefilm Review
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IntroductionHello, and welcome to this Lovefilm Review website. Before I start I'd better get the obligatory legal mumbo jumbo out of the way and say that this website is a 3rd party website and isn't part of the Lovefilm network of sites. The site is run, and has been written by me, Dan Thompson, the only connection I have to Lovefilm is as a regular paying customer, and with that out of the way we can get started on the review! As I already mentioned, my name is Dan Thompson and I'm a current Lovefilm DVD rental customer from the UK, you can see my membership info if you look at the table to your right. I'm 22 years old and work as an online marketer and web designer, one of my websites is called "Dan Reviews", it's a project of mine where I aim to review any service that I use, be it good or bad. As a Lovefilm customer I thought it would be a good idea to do a review and add it to my "Dan Reviews" website, so here we go with the review, I'm going to be looking at the rental titles available, the price, the delivery time and the support offered, each section will receive a score out of 5 and then at the end I'll add all these scores together to give Lovefilm a final score out of 20. Titles To Choose FromI always like to start my reviews on a positive so this was a good place to start! At the time of writing there are over 65,000 DVD titles available for rental on the website. These include new releases, old classics, TV shows and special limited edition box sets. As well as regular DVD's, Lovefilm also stock all of the latest Blu-Ray and HD-DVD releases so you high definition fans have plenty of choice as well! I should mention that I don't currently have a Blu-Ray player so I haven't had the chance to test out my HD TV in all it's glory but seeing all of the Blu-Ray discs on the Love Film site is making me really tempted to buy one! What do you think, would it be a worthwhile investment? Anyway, back to the review. Although Lovefilm started out as a film/DVD rental company, they now also offer you a massive selection of videos games that you can rent, the collection of video games is just as big as the DVD collection, they have just about every old, and new game available for you for each major console - Wii, XBOX 360, PS3, DS, PSP, PS2 and the Gamecube. I can't say enough good things about the amount of DVD, Blu-Ray and Videogames you can rent, it's the biggest collection I've ever come across. You can actually check this out for yourself right now by heading on over to the Lovefilm site and performing a search, you don't have to be a customer to browse through the Lovefilm collection! On that basis I'm giving this section the maximum score available, if any of you can find a DVD rental site, either online or offline with more choice then I'll eat my proverbial hat :-) Lovefilm Review score for Titles: 5/5 Lovefilm PriceThis is actually quite a difficult section for me to review because there are a lot of different pricing structures and Lovefilm are always offering special deals to new customers so to be honest it's hard for me to keep up with it all, I'll do my best to simplify things for you! I'll start off with the specials for existing customers, these are changing all of the time, but if you look at the banner to your left you'll see the latest promotion. At the time of writing the special offer allows new customers to receive 1 month of totally free service when they join Lovefilm, you can receive this offer but ONLY if you click the banner on the left of the page. (And that isn't to ensure I get a commission, you do genuinley need to click on it to activate the promotional code!) As I said, the specials do change all the time so the above paragraph may be out of date, but the banner on the left of the page will always display the latest special offers for new customers, so if you are in any doubt, just click on the banner and you'll be taken to the Love Film site where you can see details of the latest offer. Back onto the pricing, as I said before it's a bit of a mine field as there isn't 1 set package to choose from. Each package is different, the cheapest package is only £3.99 per month (I should point out that all these prices I mention are correct at the time of writing!) but this only allows you to rent 2 films each month and you can only have 1 film at home at any one time. The next package up costs £5.99 per month, but you are allowed to rent 3 titles per month. You can also choose from a number of "unlimited" packages that allow you to rent an unlimited amount of films each month, these of course cost more than the basic packages. You then have a different pricing structure if you want to also rent videogames from Lovefilm, so to make things easier, I think I'll just take a screenshot of my Lovefilm account page and then you can see all of the packages! I should also point out that you can upgrade, or downgrade your package at any time from within your Lovefilm admin area. (As you can see in the pic below)
You'll also notice that on the above chart there are "Pay as you go" packages, but to be honest, I'm not fully sure how they work so I tend to stay well clear of them. I'm currently on the "Unlimited 1" package costing £9.99 per month, it allows you to have 1 disc at home at a time, and you can rent an unlimited amount of discs per month - nice and easy to understand! So although the pricing is cheap - just think how much it would cost you to rent or buy the DVD's in an offline store! I rent between 5 and 7 DVD's each month for £9.99, it would cost an awful lot more if I had to buy those DVD's or rent them from an offline store. There are no late fee's charged by Lovefilm either so you don't find yourself sitting through a film just because it's due back at the store the next day, you simply watch the film when you have time, put it in the pre-paid envelope when you are done, send it back and Lovefilm will send you another from your list. So although the pricing is nice and cheap, and you don't get charged any hidden fee's, I'm not going to give it a perfect score simply because all the different pricing structures are slightly confusing. I think it would be better if they cut the amount of packages offered in half, it would make things a lot easier to digest. So with that in mind: Lovefilm score for Pricing: 4/5 Delivery TimeThe delivery time for online rental companies is of massive importance, it's no good if you have to wait days to receive a DVD or Videogame. Fortunately Lovefilm seems to have a good delivery system in place, here's how it works. I even took a couple of pictures for you! 1. Lovefilm post a DVD to you from your list of titles
Each DVD is sent via 1st class mail in a rather cleverly designed DVD sleeve. When the disc arrives, you peel open the sleeve and the DVD falls out, you then rip off the cover that contains your address to reveal a pre-paid envelope that you use to send the DVD back in. So you are actually using the same envelope twice. (Once when they send the film to you, then again when you post it back) 2. When you have watched the film, send it back!
As you can see from the image above, the envelope that is used to send back the DVD is a pre-paid 1st class envelope. So if you post the DVD before 5pm Lovefilm will receive the DVD the next day. When they receive the DVD, they then send you back another film that's on your list. Here's an example of how it works: Monday: You watch DVD and send it back (before the last post) I really can't fault the delivery service at all, there are of course some days when a new disc will arrive in 2 days instead of 1, but this is down to Royal Mail rather than Lovefilm. (Check the timestamp on the envelope to check) So I am going to give the "Delivery" section top marks, I just can't think of anything bad to say about it! Lovefilm score for the Delivery Time: 5/5 Website FeaturesAny online DVD/Videogame rental service needs a feature packed website that is easy to use. I have lost count of the amount of times I've come across a website that has lots of really cool features, but it is impossible to use! A website that is impossible for us, the user to navigate through is useless, luckily Lovefilm manages to strike the perfect balance between useability and features. Let me show you some "real life" examples: 1. The Ratings System The Lovefilm website lets you review and rate any DVD or Videogame on the website. Every title has 5 orange stars underneath, and you can give the item a score out of 5, 1 is terrible and 5 is Great! Not only does your score go towards the overall score for other Lovefilm users to see, the website also uses these scores to try and find other films or games that you would like based on your ratings. The more titles you rate, the more targetted your "Recommended Titles" list becomes. Here's an example of me rating the Ross Kemp In Afganistan TV series:
2. The Reccomendations I touched on this above but it's a cool feature so it deserves it's own section! The Lovefilm site will bring up a list of reccomended films, based on the ratings you have given for past films. This is very useful if you are running out of ideas for DVD's to rent, I know it's happened to me a couple of times so the recommendations have come in handy.
3. View Your Rentals & Prioritise Them Here's an overview of how the renting works. - You add a film to your rentals list using the "Add" button you can find next to all titles That all sounds fine, but what happens if you are desperate to see a particular title, and don't want to wait for it to be sent out at random? Well, the website let's your prioritise your titles. So if you are desperate to view a particular film you can set the priority as "High", this means that Lovefilm will send you that film as soon as possible. Likewise if there's a title you aren't desperate to see, you can set it as either medium, or low priority.
Overall I cannot fault the Lovefilm website, I've only mentioned 3 features above but there are so many other things I could mention as well but there just isn't enough room on the page for them all! I could mention that every film on there has a trailer that you can view before choosing to rent, I could mention that each film shows you the manufacturers description, as well as professional reviews as well as Lovefilm user submitted user reviews. The list goes on, so it's going to be no surprise when you discover that I'm giving the website features a perfect score! Website Features Score: 5/5 SupportI've only ever needed to contact the support people on 1 occasion, and that was actually to ask them about this wbesite (I asked them if I would be able to use the term "Lovefilm" in the domain name!). I used the email contact link that you can find by clicking on the "Help" page. I received a response within a couple of hours, however as I expected my question had to be passed onto another department, I then received a reply a couple of days later saying that it would be fine for me to use the domain, as long as I made it clear that the site wasn't an official Lovefilm site - so now you know why I did the mini-disclaimer at the start of the review! As well as email support, you can contact Lovefilm via phone, I've seen a lot of fuss online saying that Lovefilm don't have a phone number, but I'm not sure where these people are looking. If you click on the "Contact" link you get the phone number and the postal address, infact I'll copy/paste it here for you :-) By Phone By Mail. As I said, I've only had to use the support 1 time, the initial response was quick but I did have to be passed onto another department which slowed down the response time, so I can't give it a perfect score. Lovefilm rating for Support: 4/5 ConclusionIn closing, I would like to thank you for reading this Love Film review. I hope you've enjoyed it, and hopefully it's cleared up a few things you were wondering about. Speaking as a Lovefilm customer I have no problems in reccomending the service to my friends and family. My experience has been nothing but good, although do rest assured if anything does go belly up I'll come back and update this review! Thanks for reading, |
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