[summer]

Online Movie Rentals: Everything You Wanted to Know

By MAVIS VAZ, MACINSIDERS

If you’re a film purist like me, you’re the type of person who waits in line at the theatre an hour before the movie starts so you can get the best seat, 3 rows from the top, dead centre. You pause a DVD when someone asks a question about the movie so you won’t be talking over the movie. You refuse to watch fullscreen movies because ‘you’re missing half the fun’. If any of these describe you, then the experience of watching downloaded movies on your laptop just doesn’t cut it.

After I got tired of watching low-quality downloads on my MacBook, I decided it was time to find a better way of watching movies. If you are a movie buff, you have most likely heard of Netflix. The company holds a library of over 100, 000 movies and sends you rentals through the mail. Their prices are fairly reasonable and if you don’t have a car, you don’t have to worry about driving to the video store. Unfortunately, a quick search over the Internet also revealed that Netflix only operated in the States. Thus started my search for a similar service here in Canada.

All online movie rental services work under the same principle. You generally pay a flat rate per month, depending on how many DVDs you want to rent. The rates also increase depending on how many DVDs you want to receive at one time. For example, it will run you about $10 a month to rent one DVD at a time, but you get unlimited DVD rentals over the course of the month. So you create your list of desired rentals online, and you can rank them in order of preference. If you choose to get one DVD at a time, the company will mail you the DVD highest on your list of preferences, depending on availability, along with a prepaid envelope to mail back the DVD once you’ve watched it. Once they receive the return, they will mail out the next movie on your list that is available. Prices increase if you want more DVDs at one time, up to about $50 to receive 8 DVDs at a time.

There are usually no late fees, so you can keep the rentals as long as you want, with the catch that you can’t receive any more rentals until you return the one(s) you have. Other pitfalls of online renting are that you don’t necessarily get the movie that’s first on your list of preferences; you get the first movie on your list of preferences that is available. The size of movie libraries is also smaller than the Netflix library in the States. Finally, as with traditional video store rentals, new releases are not always readily available. Personally, I don’t mind waiting a while for new rentals. I figure if I wasn’t compelled enough to watch it in theatres, I don’t mind waiting a little bit to watch it on DVD.

The biggest online rental site in Canada at the moment is Zip. I just joined this past weekend and have yet to find out if I like the service or not. They have the biggest movie library of other rental sites in Canada, with 72,000 titles available. Canflix is smaller, with a library of about 11,000. They have better availability of new releases than Zip, but have few older movies and a miniscule collection of documentaries. In addition, they also have a collection of video game rentals. Finally, Cinemail carries about 25,000 titles, but has a slightly longer ship time since it is based out of Manitoba.

While a service that covers all preferences and has all titles readily available is still lacking in Canada, it is quite possible to find the online movie-rental service that best suits your movie-viewing tendencies. Online-movie renting takes all the hassle out of the process, dropping movies literally at your doorstep. If you do decide to try out one of these services, come back and let us know what you think!

You don't like watching movies on your computer in full screen?

No no, its more the quality of downloaded movies that I dislike more than watching them on my laptop...