DVD Rental Cheapest online providers & tart to get it free

Not so long ago, in a galaxy not so far away, people had little choice but to rent films from high st. rental shops at £4/night. With hefty late fines, many ended up with a Death Star of a bill.

The resistance came in the form of online video rental, which slashed costs for all, and banished late fees to the dark side.

Is online rental suitable for me?

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

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

Here are a few more rental tips:

• Online rental’s a boon for those with small children.

  Wee ones often like watching the same film on a loop 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 to £20. This isn’t cheap, especially if you only watch it once. Suppose you want The Twilight Saga: New Moon. This would cost £2-ish to rent, but the cheapest price to buy is £8. So you’d have to watch it four 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 paying 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 – a darn sight cheaper than video shops.

How online DVD rental works

Quite simply, its strength is convenience. 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. After they drop through your door and you’ve watched them, you simply send them back in 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, eg, Unlimited 2 means once you have two discs, one must be returned before getting another.

• Limited. You're only allowed to get 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.

To tart or not to tart?

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

• Want an easy life? If so go to Best Buy DVD rental providers.

• Super-organised, hardcore MoneySaver? If you're willing to put some serious work in to play the system, you can sign up to free trials, cancel and start again as a DVD Tart.

Best buy DVD rental providers

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

While LoveFilm itself has similar prices to Blockbuster, we've not included it in the chart, as the same thing is available for cheaper via Tesco.

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How to tart and get it free

So desperate are DVD firms to snag your custom that nearly all offer free trials, adding up to weeks of free movies. So 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.

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 following table lists companies that currently have a trial period. Lovefilm often sends out targeted 30-day trial offers to customers, eg, leaflets with pizza deliveries and mailouts with credit cards. Do look out for these.

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 cash from free trials

It’s even possible to make cash from watching free movies. Cashback websites such as Quidco* or Topcashback* have been known to pay up to £18 per free DVD trial that you sign up to. 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.

Alternatives to online rental

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 watch, 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. 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.

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