For those outside Australia, HomeScreen is one of our NetFlix clones

About a month ago I discontinued my subscription to HomeScreen after over a year on the three disk at a time plan. I was never really able to find much info about the Australian NetFlix clones, so I guess this is a bit of a contribution. What’s really needed I suppose is a comparative review, but I’m not planning on signing up with any of the others (Quickflix, BigPond Movies, others?) in the near future, so this will have to do.

For those unfamiliar with the DVD rental by mail model, the HomeScreen site probably gives a far better description that I’d manage, so I’d suggest checking it out.

I think I was one of the pretty early HomeScreen subscribers, having first heard about it via a flyer at Hoyts. They’ve improved the service quite a bit over that time, adding different plan levels, replacing a high/medium/low priority system with a full queue, and opening up some information about how long you can expect to wait for particular DVDs.

So, a few stats. I got my first DVD on the 9th of Feb 2004, and returned the last one on the 29th of April 2005, so that makes 445 days and during that time I went through about 146 DVDs (I’m not counting special feature disks separately). That works out to about one every three days, which, at $AU36.95 per month, works out at around three to four dollars a DVD. Not bad, but by no means really cheap.

I guess the main draw for me after the novelty wore off was the range of DVDs available. Unfortunately I’ve never found a DVD rental place with a good range here in Canberra. Video Ezy, Civic video and Blockbuster are all well and good for new releases, but don’t come close to HomeScreen’s range, which I can not find a number for, but is claimed as the largest DVD library in Australia. In the end, however, I found that I was struggling for movies to add to my must see list (queue), so I guess range isn’t everything.

In the early days, the turnaround was about generally around 4-5 business days between sending a DVD back and getting a new one. I assume this would be shorter in Sydney and possibly more outside the east coast capitals. For the last 6 months or so, however, HomeScreen was sending out new DVDs the day after I marked them as returned rather than when they actually got back, which cut the turnaround down to about 2-3 days. I’m not sure if this was a general policy change or my account getting special treatment.

One of the things which did keep me there for so long was running through TV series like Dark Angel and Rurouni Kenshin. Unfortunately, in both cases certain DVDs along the was seemed to have very limited availability. I began to get the feeling at one point that they only had one copy of each Dark Angel DVD and one had been lost in the mail and not replaced while still being marked as ‘Longer wait’. Of course, I did eventually get the DVD in question, and wouldn’t have had a problem with it at all if I could have rented it somewhere around here instead.

The web interface is generally quite usable, although I would have loved something like Netflix Freak. In many cases it would have been great if list views could have been longer than 24 items, but I assume there would be site performance implications. One really annoying thing was that the site only kept logins for 24 hours. If you go more than 24 hours without looking at a page, you have to login again, which I found quite annoying. Three days would have been fine, but I don’t really see why it could not be a week or more.

I never found the recommendations generated by the site based on my ratings to be really useful, although it did pull out some interesting movies once or twice. The categories and search both worked reasonably well, although there was nothing stunning. I would have loved to see searched for a series (like the Dark Angel and Rurouni Kenshin ones above) return the results in some order rather than apparently randomly.

In my time, I never had much trouble with scratches on the DVDs which had worried me a little since many of the DVDs from rental stores in Canberra are terrible. A couple of DVDs did go missing in the mail, but HomeScreen promptly ‘cleared the slots’ without causing me any trouble, which was also reassuring.

So, in the end, I left because I just wasn’t wanting to watch enough DVDs to make it worthwhile. Often I found myself watching DVDs just so I could send them back, which was pretty much the beginning of the end once I realised I was doing it. On leaving, they did offer a cheaper two disk at a time plan, but I guess I’d just had enough by then. One nice things is that if I sign back up later, my rental history (but not the must see list) seems to have been kept, which would have been a shame to lose.

I imagine I might find it worth re-subscribing some day, and while curiosity might drag me over to one of the competitors, I’d certainly be happy to end up back with HomeScreen.