{"id":35,"date":"2011-06-07T10:14:04","date_gmt":"2011-06-07T10:14:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bimedia.org\/blogs\/?guid=d10ddcac2616be0fee8cec8fde0e1cd8"},"modified":"2011-06-07T10:14:04","modified_gmt":"2011-06-07T10:14:04","slug":"lovefilm","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bimedia.org\/blogs\/2011\/06\/lovefilm\/","title":{"rendered":"LoveFilm"},"content":{"rendered":"

This weekend I finally finished looking into and setting up something I’d been considering for a while – a LoveFilm<\/a> account, tied to <\/a>greyeyedeve<\/b><\/a><\/span>‘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.<\/p>\n

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!<\/a> to Logan’s Run<\/a>. Their \u00a310\/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).<\/p>\n

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<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This weekend I finally finished looking into and setting up something I’d been considering for a while – a LoveFilm<\/a> account, tied to <\/a>greyeyedeve<\/b><\/a><\/span>‘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.<\/p>\n

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!<\/a> to Logan’s Run<\/a>. 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).<\/p>\n

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<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1211,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29,49,31,48,47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-films","category-lovefilm","category-manchester","category-organisation","category-social"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bimedia.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bimedia.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bimedia.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bimedia.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bimedia.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bimedia.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bimedia.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1211"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bimedia.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bimedia.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bimedia.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}