I have been trying out the Blockbuster Unlimited DVD Rental system for a few months, it is basically a DVD rental by post system, no return-by dates, 3 DVD’s at a time as many as you can fit in for GBP13 a month.
The service it self is great, very few scratched disks, disks always arrive promptly, packaging is well done etc. The problem comes with their web interface though, it really leaves much to be desired.
Rather than go into a list of issues that I have with it, I’ll mention some of the good things about Screen Select who I will be using from now on.
I thought I’d stick with Blockbuster out of loyalty, they are good as I said, they gave me a month free trial and they deserve my business. However over time I realized that a major part of this business is the user experience, and that isn’t just about the movies, it’s about managing your account as well.
So I have tonight manually moved the 60 odd movies I had on my wish list at Blockbuster over to Screen Select and in the process I got the hang of their user interface and so forth. It really is great, I think the biggest testament to how good is the fact that I have grown my list to 180 during the night where with Blockbuster I was running out of stuff to add! The systems both work by browsing categories and making recommendations, so clearly actually finding stuff to watch is much easier with Screen Select for me.
So the list of good things about Screen Select:
- Lots of Customer Reviews, reviewers are also rated and you can pull out all reviews by someone you notice who has a similar taste as you.
- While browsing the various categories and search results, movies already on your list are easily identifiable. You still see the movies in the search results, but instead of a ‘Add’ option you have a ‘Remove’ option for those on your list.
- Movies that you are not interested in or have seen before can easily be hidden from recommended listings, you can however still search for them by name/actor/director etc.
- The quality of the recommendations sections are top notch, and according to them it improves as you rate movies you have seen.
- Good quality monthly newsletters, with archives available including things like Actor Of The Month etc.
- Shows upcoming releases clearly, even shows movies currently on the movie circuit, so you can easily mark those things you do not want to waste money on at the cinema but still wish to see – those ‘DVD Movies’.
- It seems Screen Select has a much bigger selection, good Anime etc.
- They carry adult titles, not only porn but other stuff that’s rated R18 that was hard to find on Blockbuster, turns out quite a few of the movies I wanted to see fell in the adult category but not Porn and Blockbuster just didn’t bother stocking those. Screen Select limits access to those items with a PIN, good if you have kids around.
- The interface has no bugs, even in Firefox. Blockbuster has all sorts of annoying ‘features’ to get used too.
- The interface works intuitively, if you add a movie it brings you right back to your search results to the next movie, removing the one you added from the search results. Other things like the rating system works easily and has quite a bit of Javascript to make things go smoothly. A nice and modern interface.
So think of the above list, and then think of a online DVD store without any of them, thats Blockbuster. I cannot list the shortcomings of their interface, they simply have to start fresh and do a good job of it.
I will stick to Screen Select, and I hope the actual DVD delivery aspect of their service live up to what I got used to at Blockbuster.
