DVD Rental

Not so long ago, in a galaxy just around the corner, people had little choice but to rent films from their high st. rental shop for £3.99 a night. With hefty late fees, many ended up with a Death Star of a video bill. The resistance came in the form of online video rental, which slashed costs for all, and banished late fees to the dark side...

• Does online rental suit me?
• How online rental works
• Best Buys: Rental providers
• Best Buys:Tart for free
• The alternatives
• The size of the saving
• Other Articles/Discuss

Rent stacks of DVDs for free!

The most important thing to remember is online DVD rental generally involves signing up to a monthly direct debit, so the money drips from your account, whether you watch or not. So, as a basic rule...

"If you regularly rent films, online DVD rental is likely to be MoneySaving. If you don't, stick with high st. rentals."

Here’s a few more rental tips:

• Online rental’s a boon for those with small children.
  
  For families, it’s worth considering that wee ones often like watching films looped again and again and again for weeks. As online rental DVDs can be held for much longer, it saves you buying a film they'll quickly outgrow and never watch again.
  
  

• Why renting beats buying

  Buy a new release DVD and it will easily set you back £10 - £20. This isn’t cheap, especially if you only watch it once. Suppose you want “Pirates of the Caribbean 3”; while this would cost £2-ish to rent, the cheapest price to buy is £15. So you’d have to watch it 7.5 times before it’d be worth buying.

  Now think how many films in your collection you’ve only watched once or twice. Would rental have been cheaper? Unless the cost of buying the DVD is very cheap, the best strategy is rent the film, then decide whether you’ll watch it again, if you will and it’ll be a constant rewatch; go out and buy it. Otherwise just rent it out again the next time you want to watch it.
  

• Check out your local library first
  
  Before forking out for online rental, have a gander at your local library’s DVD selection. Libraries typically charge just £3 a week for new DVDs or £1 a week for older ones – still a darn sight cheaper than video shops.
  

Quite simply, its convenience is its strength. Sign up for a monthly direct debit and then build a wish list of titles in a ‘rental queue'. When your films become available, the rental company posts them out and then, after they drop through your door and you’ve watched them, simply send them back in the pre-paid envelopes.

There are two package types; with both you can keep films as long as you like, without late fees.

• Unlimited. Here, you watch as many DVDs as you want but you can only hold a certain number at a time e.g. Unlimited 2 means once you have two discs, one must be returned before getting another.

• Limited. You're only allowed to be sent a certain number of films per month eg Limited 3 means a maximum of three DVDs sent per calendar month. Usually you can only hold one DVD at a time.

When picking your rental list, bear in mind that big new releases get oversubscribed, so DVD companies will send out lower priority films first. Don’t fill your rental queue with hundreds of films you don’t want to watch.

There are two strategies for online DVD rental; which to pick depends on how organised you are…

• Do you simply want an easy life and a cheap deal? If so go to Best Buy DVD rental providers.
• …or are you a hardcore MoneySaver who’s super-organised and willing to put some serious work in to play the system? If so then you can sign up to free trials, cancel and then start again as a DVD Tart.
  
  
  

The Oscar for cheapest DVD provider goes to... the Lovefilm-owned Tesco dvd rental service, closely followed by Cinema Paradiso*.

Please rate your online DVD provider

The cheapest DVD provider isn’t the best value if it takes an age for films to arrive. Once you’ve started the rental, please feedback on the different providers, and how prompt the service is. Just cast your vote in the relevant poll below to have your say.

Feedback on your provider:

Cinema Paradiso, Five Movie Club, Lovefilm (includes CD-WOW!, Mymoviestream, Odeon Direct, Sofa Cinema, WHSmith Movies Direct, Tesco DVD Rental).

So desperate are DVD firms to snag your custom that nearly all offer free trials, adding up to a possible four months of free movies. So, in time-honoured MoneySaving tradition, sign up, grab the free trial, use it, then cancel and move to the next.

Yet tarting isn’t for the forgetful, undisciplined or inattentive. If that’s you, just go for one of the cheapest providers. Bad tarts could end up with multiple direct debits dripping out for unused rental or, more likely, start using a service which isn’t best for them.

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When tarting, always read terms and conditions carefully, as they can be harder to fathom than a David Lynch dream sequence, and remember, it's usually one trial per household.

The number of DVD trials you can take is limited, because most of the rental providers are owned by one big company, Lovefilm. Lovefilm will only let you trial one of its seven brands: Lovefilm, CD-WOW!, Sofa Cinema, WHSmith Movies Direct, Tesco DVD Rental, Five Movie Club and Odeon Direct.

Earn £50 from free trials

It’s even possible to make cash from watching free movies. Cashback websites such as Quidco* or Topcashback* pay up to £18 per free DVD trial that you sign up to; apply to all the free trials on offer and you’d trouser £50 profit. Read the Top Cashback Websites article for a full how to, and try out the Cashback-Sites Maximiser to see how much you could make.

Alternatively, many companies offer free stuff for signing up. Common freebies 1000 Tesco Clubcard points (worth £40 in deals from the deals brochure). These offers change frequently, to make sure you don't miss out sign up to the weekly Money Tips e-mail.

If you don't want to online, there are a few other strategies…

• Snap ‘em up in store
  
  
  Many big retailers such as Virgin, HMV and the big supermarkets have major films on offer at £2 or £3 these days, so if you spot your favourites and classics, it can be the best value way of picking up a movie. You may even be able to flog them on eBay them once you’re done, offsetting your costs.
  
  
• Sign up for a digital TV movie channel

  
  Both Sky TV and Virgin offer a number of movie channels, including Pay-per-view movies which are often the same as the new DVD rental releases. These typically cost around £3 - 4 to do; yet offer the convenience of being able to pick your film then and there.

  However while the price of the film maybe able to compete, you’ll need the whole TV package which involves a monthly fee and the range is much smaller. However if you already have one of these systems and only watch big new releases it can be cost effective; plus you can always record the film onto your set-top box’s hard drive. See Digital TV Cost Cutting for more info.
  

Online rentals can save you bags of money over the local video shop. Someone who rented four DVDs a month on the high street would pay around £4 a film, costing a massive £192 a year – not including any late fees. Yet sign up to Tescos four DVDs a month package and it’d cost just £84.