The movie industry is at its prime. Blockbusting movies are being released weekly. Since DVDs provide great quality of sound and picture, they nearly turn your home into a movie theater.

DVD rental has also turned online, as now there are many websites that have a catalog with DVDs, including the most latest, from which you can order and have it/them mailed to you. Online DVD rentals have a lot of advantages, compared to the traditional ones. For example, you get to choose from almost 50,000 different titles. Imagine the size of a Blockbuster that held that many choices! You get all the new releases when you want them. No more waiting to see a movie. There are no late fees whatsoever.

Given bellow is a comparison chart of the top 4 online DVD rental websites - Netflix, Zip.ca, Intelliflix and Blocbuster. A total of 11 different characteristics are used to make the table and at the end you can see the overall rating based on a star rating system with the maximum being 5 stars. As it's shown in the table, all 4 companies don't charge any late fees and provide unlimited plans, varying in price.

What makes Netflix really good is their well designed website, refined through several years of operation. Netflix offers the largest selection of titles, currently 80,000 and the number keeps on going. A slight disadvantage is that Netflix doesn't offer video games or adult rentals. But nevertheless, Netflix is an excellent website for finding films, because of their massive library, therefore, if you are strictly looking at renting movies from over 200 genres, then Netflix is the logical choice.

Intelliflix is like the underdog in this competition, but if you look closely at the chart, you will see that they hold a lot of advantages. Intelliflix offers the cheapest unlimited DVD rental plan at only $3.99 and they also offer video games, adult rentals and flexibility NetFlix and Blockbuster haven't matched. The flexibility is due to the fact that you can always rent any movie or game on a pay-as-you-go plan (free shipping, a week to watch it and return in pre-paid mailer). But probably the best feature which sets Intelliflix apart from the competition is their pre-paid annual membership which gives you unlimited access to all their products for just $8.25 per month during the 12 months of your membership. That is 50% cheaper than NetFlix or BlockBuster Online. Blockbuster is in tight competition with Netflix, but it seems to have taken the edge, because of offering free monthly in-store coupons to each member.

At Blockuster, each monthly rental plan includes a weekly e-coupon that can be used in any Blockbuster retail store, although store membership is required to use the coupon, and movies must be returned to the store they was rented from. Another advantage of Blockbuster ist that unlike Netflix, Blockbuster Online offers limited adult content in partnership with Playboy. Another interesting company policy by Blockbuster are the rewards they provide, based on monthly rental activity, such as ‘Rent 5 movies or games get 1 movie or game free, twice a month’. Blockbuster is now aggresively trying to lure customers away from Netflix, by offering coupons, rewards, adult content, 2600 retail stores in the country, all that combined with lower pricing.

*Zip.ca only ships rental or purchased DVDs to valid postal addresses within Canada.

Home | Netflix | Zip.ca | Intelliflix | Blockbuster

Copyright 2007, Rental-Reviews360.com. All rights reserved.