A few years back, I mentioned that I’d signed up to Amazon's DVD rental service. I’ve stayed with it since then, and it’s generally worked well for me. But Amazon decided that they didn’t want to be in the rental business, and sold their service to the ubiquitous LoveFilm[1], who quite apart from running a service under their own name, also manage branded services for Tesco and various other companies. I’d previously tried the Tesco service, and I was deeply unimpressed with the website and the order in which discs arrived. It wasn’t quite as useless as the Blockbuster service was when I tried it[2], but it really didn’t do anything to persuade me that it was worth paying for, so I can’t say I was happy when I heard that I was getting a free transfer to LoveFilm.

There were a couple of things I liked about the Amazon service: one was the ease of adding discs to my rental list by clicking a link on any Amazon DVD product page, and the other was the 10% discount I got on every DVD I bought from Amazon. People joining later only got a 5% discount, which isn’t bad, but 10% is really nice. Amazon’s information was rather vague about what would happen, and when I enquired, I got a singularly vague response.

Anyway, the transfer is now complete, and I’ve logged on to LoveFilm for the first time. I’ve also popped on to the Amazon site to see what’s what. Let’s start with the good bit:

There are still links on DVD product pages to add titles to my rental list. That does remove a major concern – franky, if I had to look in two places for DVDs, I probably wouldn’t bother, and I’d end up dropping the rental thing.

Now the semi-good bit:

You will continue to receive the same 5% DVD retail purchase discount until you have used the full value of the certificate, or until 2 years following the transfer of your account to LOVEFiLM.

Errr, I have a 10% discount, actually. And what certificate? I’ve seen no certificate, or any indication that I would get one. I’ll chase that up and see if I can get a more meaningful response.

And now the totally pants bit:

Amazon let me set my order of priority exactly as I wanted. I could number the discs 1, 2, 3…, and they were always very good about getting me things in the order I asked for – the only exceptions being recent releases that were in high demand. LoveFilm let me set priority as High, Medium and Low. That’s a bit naff, and a big step back from what I had before, and in the depressingly typical way companies have of making a reduction in service sound like they’re doing me a favour, they tell me that this is really good!! It’s great!! You can have more than one first choice! Isn’t that great?

Well, I’ll see how it goes over the next few months. I’m not all that impressed so far…

[1] Not giving them a link, so there
[2] I gave them a huuuuuge list and they could never manage to send anything from near the top, or from the genre I asked for on a particular delivery.