Amazon buys Lovefilm
DVDs and Blu-rays by post
Amazon is buying Lovefilm, the European subscription film and game service.
The bookseller already owned 42 per cent of the company and is now buying all the remaining shares. Financial terms were not disclosed, but previous reports suggest a value of around £200m for Lovefilm which claims 1.4 million customers.
Amazon used to run a similar service to Lovefilm, but closed it in order to partner with Lovefilm. Subscribers to Lovefilm pay a monthly fee in order to hire either one, two or three DVDs, or games, at any one time. Once you've watched a film you post the disc back, and receive another film from your selection.
The companies said they'd had a strong relationship since 2008, when Lovefilm bought Amazon's DVD business.
Simon Calver, chief executive of Lovefilm, said with Amazon's support his company would be able to improve "members' experience across Europe".
Lovefilm is also getting into digital delivery of films and you can choose to have them streamed to your Playstation 3 or watch them online. It operates in the UK, Germany, Sweden, Norway and Denmark.
COMMENTS
looked at lovefilm last night
I only wanted to be able to legally watch some stuff at my convinence without filling my house with more crap.
There were two problems,
1) The stream was pretty LQ I checked it with a few shows/films, crunchy is vastly superior.
2) None of the series I wanted to watch were available (at that very moment I wanted to watch Enterprise. It was all I desired. I didn't want to wait, I had a spare hour and wanted to watch an episode right then.) Sadly lovefilms does not have this, or any other sci-fi (bar andromida and some ancient stuff) series available online. So vexxed I ended up watching it on mega instead and I'll likely cancel lovefilms at the end of the weekend (It has DarkStar and my friend hasn't seen it!!!!)
See that's what I like about on demand and internet download, if i decide i want something then and there at midnight for no good reason at all, I can have it. Depending on speed a film in about an hour at HD quality. A big game from steam or gamersgate will take a few hours, but I'll have it when I wake up. So on and so forth. I don't care about business models, or licensing, or regulation, at 1am all I know is I want to watch Enterprise and I want to watch it then, and I'm even willing to pay for the pleasure. Failing that I'll steal it. I wanted to give you money, you didn't want it, so I'll take it instead.
Happy LoveFilm customer
Am I the only happy LoveFilm customer?
We started with Amazon rentals and then went with LoveFilm when they took over. Amazon's was better than LoveFilm as you you could rank movies in the order that you wanted rather than in the crude high/medium/low priorities.
Renting is better than purchase for a lot of movies and TV series that you're only likely to watch once or twice ever. It's cheaper and you don't have the storage problems. It's not perfect but I don't think it's as bad as the other posters suggest.
BTW, 'Captain Underpants', you don't need Silverlight to stream from LoveFilm.
The websit is a bit awful, yes
Can't even seem to manage to put in a login screen without lapsing into Ajax-ey nonsense. However, it'll also be good If they can obtain a proper distribution network, and not just blame the Post Office all the time. None of my other post appears to be affected, so the only rational explanation is that, either my postman hates Lovefilm, or Lovefilm are just lying.
Oh, this reminds me...
...must cancel my Lovefilm subscription. Don't think I'll ever be going back there, their priority list is a big fat joke. I've had some titles in High Priority for months and they kept ignoring them and sending me low and medium priority things.
Bye bye Lovefilm, can't say I'll miss you.
Improve members' experience across Europe
By, for example, settling their dispute with Universal?
