Intelliflix -- not one of the coolest sites

You've heard of Netflix and Blockbuster, well Intelliflix is, according to them, much better. They are, by far, certainly the cheapest solution on the internet for renting movies. However, I am here to say that this is one site you should probably avoid.

Here's their best deal: for $99, you get to rent up to two movies at a time for a year (there are many other plans as well). You return the movies for other movies. I found it difficult to rent more than 5 movies in a month. But the local rental place costs about $4 a title and http://www.intelliflix.com/ costs only $8.25 a month. So if you rent 6 movies a month, you save about two thirds of what you'd spend at the video store. If you rent only half that many, Intelliflix is still cheaper. They say they have 60,000 titles to choose from. DVDs come to your mailbox and you return them in the same envelope. They pay for shipping both ways.

That's the upside. The downside is considerable. First, they flat-out tell you that you can just forget about getting recent titles soon after they're released. I had to wait a week after one popular movie was released before I could even request it. I complained. They said it was in high demand. They didn't say by whom. I assume it was the staff watching it before the rest of us. There is no on-line equivalent of camping out at the video store waiting for that new release. After seven weeks of waiting, I gave up and rented it from a video store.

In fact, they hardly have any recent films available for rent. The fourth newest release in their new releases category has been available on DVD for nearly 10 months. There are only three movies available that are newer than that.

While they say they have 50% more titles than Netflix, some of them are adult titles which lower-priced plans do not include. They say they have more distribution centers than Netflix, but it can take over a week for a movie to get back to them by US mail. To make sure that you have something to watch, you fatten your queue (wish list) with everything you can think of. Some much older titles, surprisingly, show as "in high demand" and are not guaranteed to be available to you for a month or more.

Another failing is the lack of sufficient numbers of titles in widescreen. Now that widescreen TVs are selling well, this really ought to change. Probably the biggest problem is the fact that you don't know when you're going to get a particular title. On the other hand, they email you a notification when they ship you a title, so you get advanced notice. You can mark one title as "shipped" on their website when you send it back and they will send you another one without waiting to receive it--a very nice feature.

Recently, they've put 10 of the movies in my queue in a "waiting area" and they say they will come out as soon as they are available. Most of these are older movies, so it is very difficult to get movies in a timely manner from them. When I first joined a few months ago, they kept the movies coming so that I was almost never without one to watch. But now I have to complain to even get one.