CafeDVD as of late seems to be a ghost ship with movies not shipping or checked in after being mailed back and emails go without a response. I understand that they are a tiny company but those issues coupled with an aging storefront, circa 1998, is eroding my confidence. So Management and I are canceling our subscription and are off hunting for a new service.
Plenty of our friends use Netflix and while the attraction of using the biggest competitor in the market is understandable a common refrain is that while they have a vast collection of movies it is like Blockbuster, for every Kurosawa film there are ten Ernest Goes To ___ movies. I’m not totally convinced that I’d like the service and the endless mutterings from users about throttling users queues sort of turns me off as well.
The challenge that we see is there are few competitors in this field and only a scarce amount that I would call legitimate. GreenCine is one of the services that caught our eye as it seems to have a robust queue management system like Netflix as well as a vibrant community the discusses, reviews, and recommends movies. The later is a big plus as it is the community that has kept me hooked on eMusic these last seven years. Another great thing about GreenCine is that they set aside a percentage of profits to donate to Film Arts organizations in North America.
Once we settle things out with CafeDVD we’ll likely be signing up with GreenCine.
I’m interested in your quest for a good online dvd rental company. My bf and I are very lucky with our access to the film and video collection at our university library. When we no longer have access, we’ll be looking at online dvd rentals. Too bad the CafeDVD hasn’t been working out for you.
Management spent sometime combing GreenCine and seems pretty excited about the selection. They do a pretty good job of putting together articles to introduce certain genres like Noir and Zombie taking the reader through the history and highlighting the key films. Very cool.
I’ll post how the sign-up goes and how the service works out.
In Netflix’s corner, they now have the streaming movies. I’ve got the little “box” connected to my TV that lets my watch _some_ Netflix movies instantly (and the same service is coming to the Xbox soon). The service is included with a regular Netflix subscription.
On the downside, most of the movies available for streaming are the Ernest Goes To ___ variety. They do however have a lot of DVD boxed sets available for immediate streaming. I managed to watch a hundred episodes of The Office over the course of a few days.
Yeah, the streaming movie thing looks very cool and it was something that made us lean towards Netflix but the whole homegrown-indie vibe of GreenCine won us over in the end. We are suckers for the scrappy little dog in the marketplace.