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LOVEFiLM Review
- UK
- Some European Countries
- Prices vary according to title
- Rental Movies
- New releases - £3.49 for super high quality and £2.49 for high quality
- Short films - 79p
- Movies to buy
- New releases - around £13.99
- Short films - £2.50
- UK only
- Choose from over 200 titles
- Download short films for as little as 79p
- Collection includes titles recommended by other members and whole film collections
- Easy to use download manager software
- Range of free downloads to choose from
- Start watching before the movie has finished downloading
- Transfer movies to a portable player
- Download movies to rent or own
- No subscription fees, pay per download
- Some download titles also come with a free copy of the original DVD
- Burn movies to disc (certain titles)
- Active community for reviewing movies
- Customer reviews and start ratings
- Range of TV and sports titles to download
- Personal reccomendations based on movies you have watched previously
- Frequent special offers and promotional prices
- Entertainment news every day
- Windows only
Lovefilm bills itself as the most popular UK based online DVD rentals provider. It has now branched out into offering movies for download as well the original mail order service. Unfortunately it's only available to UK and a few European country customers just now, but still deserves a place high up here in our top ten list. Read on to find out why.
Lovefilm offers an excellent, cleanly designed web site for accessing their movie library. Movies can be browsed by category or searched for based on a number of different parameters. Both ways provide a really easy route to finding the movie you want. One particularly nice feature of the browsing method is that beside each thumbnail of the DVD box cover it lets you see the average star rating other users have awarded the movie. This is a great way of quickly getting an idea of the quality of movies you might not have heard of.
While we're on the subject of customer ratings we should really point out how great the Lovefilm community is. The community features seem to be used a lot more than some other sites we have reviewed and provide some really useful information on the movie. For example each movie page has a comments section for user reviews which shows you precisely how many people 'loved it' and 'hated it' and their reasons for doing so. The ironic British sense of humour is clearly evident in many of these reviews and they can make for some good reading. (As an example have a look at http://www.lovefilm.com/product/detail.html?product_id=20537)
The community feel is helped by the fact that the whole site feels very friendly to use. Help and advice are provided all over in an easy to read style and customers can make and share their own movie lists. Lovefilm will even take recommendations from members on new titles to add to its collection. Coupled with the regular entertainment features and quizzes, the site provides enough distraction to keep you busy while your movie downloads.
Another great feature of Lovefilm is the free content it offers to members. There isn't much of it at present, but it's much better quality than some other sites. Typically it consists of short comedy films or quirky cartoons that are great if you want to kill a few minutes online. As well as the free content there are also a number of TV and sports titles you can choose from and these can be downloaded a lot cheaper than movies.
As is the norm for movie download providers, Lovefilm provides you with a small piece of software which handles downloading and managing movies. The software provided is very simple and easy to use and should have you downloading movies in no time.
As usual any films downloaded from Lovefilm are protected by a DRM mechanism. Also, as is usual for movie downloads, the mechanism in this case is Microsoft's Windows Media DRM. This means that downloads should be compatible with any Microsoft products and also with portable players that support plays for sure technology. We should also point out that Lovefilm kindly offers a portable version of each movie that's a smaller file size but lower quality - perfect for on the move.
With the rental option you can watch movies an unlimited number of times within a 24 hour period and store the file on your hard drive for up to 7 days. With the 'to buy' option the movie is yours to keep and in many cases Lovefilm will also send you a physical copy of the DVD to keep. A 'to buy' license allows you to watch the movie on one pc and transfer it to one portable player.
The quality of the movies offered by Lovefilm is on par with most other good movie download sites. They offer three different levels of quality - one being the portable quality we just mentioned. The other two qualities, high(800K) and superhigh(1500K), are roughly equivalent to VHS and DVD quality respectively. Where both versions are available you usually get a cheaper download if you opt for only high quality.
Lovefilms prices for downloading movies are very reasonable, but perhaps not the best around. The strange idea of paying a different price depending on the quality of the download makes it difficult to compare the pricing structure to the other sites in this category.
Lovefilm is an excellent movie download service and provides more besides. Alongside the first rate service, wide range of movies and high quality downloads the community features are a big attraction for this site. Although currently only available in the UK and parts of Europe we would highly recommend Lovefilm to anyone in these regions.
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