Renting movies online is gaining in popularity, but it’s still a short-term, flawed solution. While we wait for technology to catch up with the ambitious promises that were made years ago (that’s right, I’m referring to ubiquitous broadband and streaming movies), we’ll continue to see greater and greater demand for online DVD rentals.

If you’re about to make a decision on your DVD rental house of choice (or even if you’re considering a move), be sure to look over the entirety of the service, including these important factors:

Distribution Centers: for added convenience, you will want to be sure that there is a fulfillment center near you. This can make the difference between a one to two day turnaround, and a three to four day turnaround. This consistent turnaround time will become important to you as a user of the service so that you can plan your returns and rentals around typical viewing nights.

DVD Selection: the breadth of movie selection is obviously important. Many movie watchers are only interested in new releases, but you should also consider what the inventory of TV series, classics, and movies from the past two decades is like You might be surprised to find yourself turning off cable because you can rent all of the best series from network television, Showtime, HBO, and more.

DVD Availability: A wide selection of movies is only one consideration — having enough copies of each title is also important. The number of copies of each movie will never be disclosed, but for the most part, the more popular the service, the deeper their selection. In this area, Netflix is generally considered to outrank Blockbuster.

Ratings and Other Information: being able to view what others think about a movie is important to help you narrow down your selection. Ideally, your service will be able to learn from your movie selections and soon be able to suggest movies to you with some degree of accuracy.

Usability: as you build your rental list and look for movies to rent, you’ll start to appreciate more and more how easy a web site is to use. Looking at things like the ability to search and browse, ease of navigation, response times and availability of the site, etc. will have a major impact on your satisfaction with a service. I personally find this one of the top three factors for online DVD rental.

Specialized Features: each service will have characteristics that make it unique from the other services. For example, Netflix has a very convenient movies on demand section. The selection of titles isn’t great, but is still better than a swift kick in the pants. Similarly, the ability to walk into a local store to return movies or rent new ones, as you get with the Blockbuster service, are also very important to some.

Considering all of the factors above, there really are only two logical choices for a rental service, and those are Netflix and Blockbuster. To look at how each of these rental houses stacks up with each other, and to see which one’s best for you, check out the Netflix vs. Blockbuster comparison referenced below. It stacks the services up side-by-side, and can help make your decision much easier.

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