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LoveFilm
This weekend I finally finished looking into and setting up something I'd been considering for a while - a LoveFilm account, tied to 
goodqueenmolly's PS3. Much as we enjoy going to the cinema, it can be difficult for us to organise, and so something a bit more flexible which doesn't involve leaving the house looked like a good idea - and the online streaming for many titles means we don't even have to wait for the post office or make it out to the postbox.
First up, LoveFilm's T&Cs don't seem to be too terrible, and people's experiences (particularly after their recent takeover) seem to be mostly good. Eve checked out the list of titles and there seems to be a fair amount of the Asian horror films she likes, along with a bunch of classic sci-fi and horror films from Them! to Logan's Run. Their £10/mo package includes unlimited film streaming, plus one physical medium rented at a time. Interestingly, there's no difference in rental between DVD and Blu-Ray, so if you have a Blu-Ray player there's no reason not to rent them (as opposed to purchase, where Blu-Ray is still far more expensive).
The bigger concern I had was the requirement for a PlayStation Network account - as we all know, this service has been hacked to hell and back repeatedly over the last few months, and I didn't want to have to trust it with personal information, particularly not credit card details. But it seems you don't need to provide CC details to set up a PSN account, nor to link your PSN account to your LoveFilm account. You *do* need to provide your LoveFilm username and password, which is a shame, and does mean that an attacker might be able to get your CC details out of LoveFilm. I'd rather see something like the OAuth protocol used by Twitter to link the accounts in a more limited way, and will suggest this to LoveFilm.
The film streaming works pretty well; the UI for navigating titles is rubbish, and the first minute or so of the streamed movie seems to suffer from blocky encoding, but the "near-DVD" quality is quite watchable after that. It buffers enough to cope with the brief ADSL disconnects we frequently suffer, which was my main concern.
So anyway, I suspect we'll be actually paying for the service once our one-month trial ends, and can afford this now Eve's cancelled her eMusic account. This probably means more movie nights at our place - if there's something you particularly want to see, let us know and we can look at adding it to our queueueueueueue.
goodqueenmolly's PS3. Much as we enjoy going to the cinema, it can be difficult for us to organise, and so something a bit more flexible which doesn't involve leaving the house looked like a good idea - and the online streaming for many titles means we don't even have to wait for the post office or make it out to the postbox.First up, LoveFilm's T&Cs don't seem to be too terrible, and people's experiences (particularly after their recent takeover) seem to be mostly good. Eve checked out the list of titles and there seems to be a fair amount of the Asian horror films she likes, along with a bunch of classic sci-fi and horror films from Them! to Logan's Run. Their £10/mo package includes unlimited film streaming, plus one physical medium rented at a time. Interestingly, there's no difference in rental between DVD and Blu-Ray, so if you have a Blu-Ray player there's no reason not to rent them (as opposed to purchase, where Blu-Ray is still far more expensive).
The bigger concern I had was the requirement for a PlayStation Network account - as we all know, this service has been hacked to hell and back repeatedly over the last few months, and I didn't want to have to trust it with personal information, particularly not credit card details. But it seems you don't need to provide CC details to set up a PSN account, nor to link your PSN account to your LoveFilm account. You *do* need to provide your LoveFilm username and password, which is a shame, and does mean that an attacker might be able to get your CC details out of LoveFilm. I'd rather see something like the OAuth protocol used by Twitter to link the accounts in a more limited way, and will suggest this to LoveFilm.
The film streaming works pretty well; the UI for navigating titles is rubbish, and the first minute or so of the streamed movie seems to suffer from blocky encoding, but the "near-DVD" quality is quite watchable after that. It buffers enough to cope with the brief ADSL disconnects we frequently suffer, which was my main concern.
So anyway, I suspect we'll be actually paying for the service once our one-month trial ends, and can afford this now Eve's cancelled her eMusic account. This probably means more movie nights at our place - if there's something you particularly want to see, let us know and we can look at adding it to our queueueueueueue.