How much do I LOVEFiLM?

Over the Christmas break I signed up for LOVEFiLM (to use it’s official spelling) on my PS3 to try out what the streaming was like. In short, it’s good, the catalogue on PS3 is limited and they only present films in standard definition wirth stereo sound. You could complain more, no doubt some have, but when they include films such as The Third Man, TV shows like Robot Chicken and lovely short films you’d never normally see, like Cashback to stream whenever you like for only a tenner a month, it’s a pretty good deal – and you get to have one film sent to you via post the old fashioned way too.

But am I getting my monies worth? For the purposes of this test I shall only be looking at if I have got good value out of my use of the service, as opposed to if there are better alternatives.

First, the maths, on an optimal time scale we can assume the following timescale:

Day 1: Movie is sent from LOVEFiLM to me
Day 2: Movie is delivered to me + watch movie
Day 3: Movie is posted back to LOVEFiLM

So the maximum amount of use I can get is 1 film every 3 days, 10 films a month 2/12 a week (based on 30 days in a month). However, this formula doesn’t take into account that Sunday is of complete irrelevance in this formula as there is no postal delivery or collections. So let’s knock off 4 days from the 30 average to account for the Sunday’s and we have 26 days, which leads to a new optimal 8.667 rentals a month. Which would make my weekly schedule for the rest of the year look something like this:

Monday: send movie back to LOVEFiLM
Tuesday: LOVEFiLM send movie to me
Wednesday: Movie is delivered, I watch movie
Thursday: send movie back to LOVEFiLM
Friday: LOVEFiLM send movie to me
Saturday: Movie is delivered, I watch movie

Now I could adjust this plan, but however it is done, the optimal plan will have two regular days where you have to have be watching a movie and it would be logical make one of those Saturday (as Sunday is thrown in for free). This would make Wednesday movie night for the rest of my subscription.

A much more reasonable approach I feel would be to just go for one movie a week. Is that a good deal? £2.50 a week to watch one movie? As it’s a Blu-Ray movie and they now cost what DVDs used to I reckon so, seeing as the aforementioned streaming is available for when my rental is in the post.

So how have I done since January? To date I have had 6 rentals, all Blu-Ray, compared to an optimal 14.667 or the more reasonable 7 at one per week. So I’m only 1 rental behind, if that’s not cause for cracking open the single malt, what is?

To end this blog here is a list of the films I have rented and streamed from LOVEFiLM so far this year presented as a score out of 5 stars and in chronological order.

RENTAL
Black Death ****
Ghost in the Shell 2.0 Redux ***1/2
Transformers 2- Revenge of the Fallen ½
The Lovely Bones ***
Sky Crawlers ****1/2
How to Train Your Dragon *****

STREAMED
Three Kings ****1/2
Let The Right One In ***1/2
The Third Man *****
Arthur and the Invisibles ***
Indiferrence (short film) ***
Bitch Slap (ok so I fell for theobvious titling gimmick here, I have not rated it as it would be unfair to rate something you didn’t bother seeing more than 10 minutes of – a great thing with streaming movies is there is no feeling of “oh, but I paid money for this, maybe I should keep watching it” like there is with a traditional rental or purchase)
Team America ****
Robot Chicken Star Wars ****
Robot Chicken Star Wars Episode 2 ****
Cashback (short film) ****1/2
The Infidel ***
Dark Star ***
A Very Long Engagement ****