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By Bruce Stevens
Staff Writer
Monday, 20 October 2008
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The Problem with Online DVD Rental
Bruce's 5 simple things that could improve the problem of lack of popular titles:
- Employ a 'popular title' tax
- Make it worth our while to return popular titles fast
- Be honest about availability of popular titles
- Disallow free trialists access to the most popular titles
- Employ two-tier membership packages
Read our reviews of:
Lovefilm DVD Rental
Blockbuster DVD Rental
Outnow.co.uk DVD Rental
CinemaParadiso DVD Rental
Other DVD Rental News & Features
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Anna Konig takes a closer look at the best online DVD rental free trials and decides who offers the best free trial or the longest free trial.
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TAKE a wander around any Blockbuster video store – once buzzing and full of life, nowadays empty and somewhat down-at-heel - and you soon realise that the days of a high street rentals are singing their swan song.
The reasons for this are many, but surely the biggest culprit is the rise and rise of online DVD rental, via sites like Lovefilm, CinemaParadiso and, ironically, Blockbuster itself!
As mighty as online DVD rental may be, it suffers a number of flaws but none more so than the bane of every DVD rental customer’s life: Trying to get a popular title!
With hundreds of thousands of customers each, the reason you’ll probably never receive the titles at the top of your queue is obvious: a company simply cannot hold enough copies of a newly released, popular movie to please every user.
But there is a hell of a lot they could to better the odds, and few – if any – of them are doing anything about it.
So here is our five-point manifesto of how to cure the problem of availability of popular titles:
1. Employ a ‘Popular Title’ tax
A quick glance at the Top 20 list of most-rented titles at both Blockbuster and Lovefilm reveals one thing: titles do not remain popular for long.
After all, with new movies appearing on DVD almost weekly, what is red-hot this week, will be stale and bargain-bin material before the month is out.
In light of the short shelf life of a top title, we suggest the imposition of a ‘Top Title’ tax.
Now we wouldn’t suggest calling it a ‘tax’ – we’re sure the marketing geniuses who do so well at luring us into signing up with them could come up with a better spun name – but the idea would be to charge users a small amount – 25p for example – to add that title to their queue.
The amount wouldn’t be large enough to put off customers who want the title, but would be enough to deter those who are just adding it for the heck of it.
The tax wouldn’t guarantee that the customer would receive the title, and the title would only be taxed for a short period – say 2 weeks, but we believe it would go a long way to freeing up the most popular titles at their peak of desirability.
2. Incentivize customers to return top titles fast
We know the whole idea of online DVD rental means no late fees, but incentivizing customers to return popular titles quickly could speed the turnaround of these films by a good margin.
Popular titles could be sent out in a different envelopes – yellow, instead of red, for example – and customers should be urged to watch it first and send it back immediately.
This has been employed already by beleagured DVD rental site Outnow.co.uk.
However, it could be taken a step further by offering customers loyalty points or some other reward if the title is watched and returned within a certain, short time period.
3. Be honest about Top Title availability
Lovefilm, Blockbuster and the rest of you lot – we are not stupid!
OK, we understand why you can’t reveal how many copies of each popular title you actually hold. We understand that we would probably all resign from your service with immediate effect, but let’s meet somewhere in the middle?
We’d love to see you all implement the ‘Get Now’ button that New Zealand DVD rental company Fatso.co.nz displays when a title is actually available for immediate dispatch. If the title is out, you simply get to add the title to your queue.
We know pigs will fly before we see that, so how about at least giving us a vague clue about the availability of a top title? Use a colour coded ‘Chance of getting this title straight away’ graph alongside the title, where shades of green indicates you have a relatively good chance, and darker shades of red indicate a poor chance.
You know, you’d be surprised at how many people would become less disillusioned with your services if you were a little more honest. Just a thought.
4. Practise free-trial apartheid
Who doesn’t hate free trialists?
We know some DVD rental companies appear to hate them more than others (not mentioning any names, Outnow.co.uk), but isn’t it time to accept that free trialists don’t need to rent top titles to get a feel for the system?
Understandably, this means no trialists will be able to test the service for how easily available are its top titles, but there are two ways around this:
- Allow them to pay a small amount to opt in as a standard member and rent top titles
- Offer two tiers of trials: a lengthy trial of, say, four weeks if they don’t take out top titles, or a shorter trial of, say, one week if they want to be like all the rest of the full paying customers.
Ultimately, DVD rental sites need to do something about discouraging free-trialists from getting their hands on top titles at the expense of full paying members.
5. Offer a two-tier membership package
Another form of apartheid which may not sit well in the chat rooms of MoneySavingExpert.com, but which would go a long way to solving the issues of availability of popular movies.
Offer two forms of membership package: Priority and Standard.
Priority members will pay a little more, but will guarantee themselves a better chance of getting a top title. In real terms this will mean that new titles will only be sent to priority members for, say, the first two weeks of its release.
Standard customers will forfeit this right, but will be able to rent the title after its priority status has been removed.
So, will it happen…?
Will we see UK DVD rental sites scrambling to employ any of these methods? We doubt it.
They play customers for fools and they wonder why the vitriol gets spurted from firehoses on the message boards.
It will take a brave DVD rental (or games rental for that matter) company to employ any of the above, but we’ll be the first to sign up to the ones that do.
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