easyCinema.com DVD rental

Mail DVD
Originally uploaded by dan taylor.

I'd been put off signing up to the plethora of online DVD rental services up till now because of the commitment of a monthly fee (on top of mobile phone, broadband, Napster to Go, Empire subscription, etc.). Then along came everyone's favourite Greek entrepreneur and set up easyCinema.com online DVD rentals (money clearly wouldn't stretch to a new TLD). Unsurprisingly, it's a no-frills service with a flat fee of £1.99 per rental, although it's not strictly speaking pay-as-you-go in that you have to buy a batch of credits (4, 7 or 10) which determines how many DVDs you can rent at a time (1, 2 and 3 respectively).

I received my first batch of 3 this week and so far so good. They arrived in natty orange (natch) envelopes which you have to open carefully as they double as the return packaging. The 25,000-strong catalogue seems to cover most mainstream titles and the selection process works well (you can rank titles according to how soon you'd like to receive them). On the down side, the recommendation algorithms clearly needs some fine tuning (I've told it 20 films I want to see and it recommends me bloody Ladies In Lavender!) and there's no A-Z, for when the Search engine lets you down.

Not sure whether I'll be still using it six months down the track but for the moment, anything which keeps me out of the soulless Blockbuster gets my vote...