DVD and Game Disk Rentals by Mail

Imagine never having to get in your car, drive to the local DVD rental store and stand in line to rent your favorite movies. When you rent DVDs online, you get your flicks sent directly to you. Plus, you'll have more selection-that's 1000s, not 100s of movies to choose from including the most sought after new titles and those hard to find ones. And if you rent adult titles, you won't have those awkward moments of handing your selection to the clerk behind the counter-in the online world it's all anonymous.

How Do I Pick a Rental Site?

What do you want to rent-movies, adult features and/or games? Do you want a membership-based plan or do you want to rent on a per-title basis? These are important questions to ask yourself. When choosing a service, free trials and price shouldn't be your only deciding factors. You should also consider customer service, selection, and the speed that you receive your movies.

Our top picks based on all these factors. For mainstream movies, our top pick is Netflix. They deliver at lightening speed, have an amazing selection of titles, and excellent customer service. In the world of gaming sites, we recommend Gamefly. They have a wide variety of titles and nice pricing plans. As for adult movies, we choose WantedList for their outstanding customer service, amazing selection of titles, and good variety of pricing plans.

How Do Online Rentals Work?

Netflix has revolutionized the online DVD rental process. Many online rental sites use their process. Look through their site, choose the DVDs you want, and put them in your queue. Your queue is a basically just a list of titles that you organize in an order you want to see them. And if you change your mind, you can always reorder, delete or add titles. It's that simple.

It's recommended that you have at least 20 titles in your queue at any given time. That way, if your next movie is unavailable, you won't have to wait to receive your next movie; the next title on your list will be sent to you. For example, if Good Fellas is #1 on your list and Scar Face is #2 and there are no copies of Good Fellas for rental, you will be sent Scar Face. Once Good Fellas becomes available, it will be sent to you as your next selection.

We recommend choosing a membership-based site over an a la carte rental site. If you like to watch a lot of movies, it's more cost effective. If you choose the Netflix 3-at-a-time plan, you'll be paying a little under $20 a month. If you rent movies on a per-title basis at $4 a pop, you could be paying $20 just to rent 5 movies. Definitely not a bargain!

I'm Ready to Return My Rental Discs. What Do I Do?

Netflix, Wanted List and most of the other online rental sites, send your selections to you in an envelope that tears off and transforms into a return envelope to mail your disk back. Put the DVD or game disk in the postage-paid envelope and drop it into a mailbox. Then, wait for your next title to come.

Many times, customers will lose the return envelope before they've actually viewed their title. You can do 1 of 2 things. Contact the site and request another envelope be sent to you. Or, drop the disk(s) in an any envelope, put some postage on it, and mail it. Make sure the disks are not right on top of each other; this could cause them to be scratched or destroyed and you could be liable for this. If returning multiple disks, you'll want to put each disk in its own envelope and then put the envelopes inside of another envelope. Or, you can wrap each disk in paper, saran-wrap or bubble-wrap.

The Bottom Line

Renting online is convenient, offers many more choices than your average neighborhood rental shop, and can save you more than a few bucks if you rent quite often. The key is finding an online site that meets your needs, such as renting DVDs, games and/or adult titles and how many you receive at one time. Once you start renting online, you'll more than likely be hooked.

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