How to Avoid DVD Rental Mistakes

How to Avoid DVD Rental Mistakes

The mistakes we’re talking about here are threefold, they consist of: losing out on value for money, getting the wrong films and failing to cancel.

Taken as a whole, though, we can call them online DVD rental mistakes because although singly any one of them could be made and regretted at length and possibly mooned over at length in the manner of a lost lover – all nights in wearing pyjamas and tubs of expensive ice-cream – altogether they can be felt in full only with an online DVD rental subscription.

This tends to be case no matter what the online DVD rental provider is whether it’s lovefilm, Blockbuster or OutNow in the UK or Netflix et al in the United States.

So how does one avoid these online DVD rental mistakes? Here are the three best ways.

First, the most important thing is to choose the best DVD rental deal on the market for your needs.

There’s no point kidding yourself that you’re going to feel like watching four films a week just because you have some unresolved Tarantino issues that you’ve got to watch every film in existence.

Don’t bother getting films you know are dross like Keeping the Faith, One Fine Day and anything that has Richard Gere in it.

You might think life’s short and you want to fill every moment with new experiences but fifteen minutes into the Sex and the City movie you’ll realise that life is short and you’d much rather spend it watching re-runs of Friends.

To put it another way, and as my mother always said to me in reference to almost everything: just say no.

Second, on a related point don’t get drawn into getting the wrong films.

DVD sites where you can rent sites can let you search by director but that’s no reason to watch every film that Woody Allen ever made. A lot of them are worth a miss.

Similarly, try to get Blu ray rental whenever you can – as it’s better value for money – but never rent a film because it’s in blu ray.

That’s how I ended up watching Iron Man.

Finally, as a writer for a DVD comparison website I can’t tell you how often I get variations on this email ‘my dvd rental company is still taking money from my account’.

People take out a free trial for rental and sometimes they even go the whole hog and sign up and then forget they ever did it and end up paying months and months down the line for a good service that they missed out on because they simply forgot what they were doing.

If this sounds like some you’d do then for goodness sakes but a giant note on your fridge door, your bathroom mirror or your partner’s forehead and cancel your DVD rental subscription when you’re not using it – most services even let you freeze the account for a while if you’re going away.