I have recently joined two online DVD Rental companies.

The deal is that you pay a small monthly fee (like $19.95 for three movies out at once) and you get to rent as many DVD's as you want per month. The only catch is that you can only have out a certain number of movies (depending on your plan) and you get charged the monthly fee whether you use the service or not. Once you have the movies out you can keep them as long as you want without any late fees. Once you send a movie back to them, they send you another movie that is listed in your movie queue.

The two companies I have joined so far are NetFlix and Wal-Mart DVD Rentals (scroll down to where it says "DVD Rentals").

NetFlix has the better selection of movies. The main thing I am using this services for right now is to rent television series. You can get all the X-Files, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Friends, The Sopranos, Sex and the City, Band of Brothers, etc. Netflix is really good in the regard. Also, NetFlix ships from Phoenix so I get the movies the next day. I can maximize my rentals this way.

Wal-Mart DVD Rentals has a decent, but not as good of a selection of movies and seems to have better availability than NetFlix. They do offer the television series on DVD, but they don't have as many different series as NetFlix. I mainly use NetFlix for TV series and Wal-Mart for movies. Wal-Mart ships from Georgia, so it takes a little longer to get your movies. But they also have a nice Postal Service Tracking deal. Once you mail the DVD back and they detect it, they send you another DVD even though they have not yet physically received it. You don't have to wait for them to check it back in before they send you another movie out of your three movie limit.

It should also be noted that NetFlix uses a system to determine who gets movies that are in high demand, like new releases. If you want a LOT of new releases right away and you rent a lot of movies from them, these services are probably not for you as they give out high demand movies to new customers and customers that haven’t rented much so far that month. For me, it is perfect because I am catching up on a lot of movies and watching television shows I liked in the past, but didn't happen to catch of the episodes.

Here is a link to Netflix's DVD Allocation System as discovered by one very astute customer. Overall though, if you rent a lot of movies at your local video store, you can save some money this way. Personally, I like it.

Netflix is great. I rarely experience wait on my rentals. rarely new releases, only a couple of art house flicks that they buy one or two discs.

Here in greater Los Angeles they ship some discs(popular ones) from Santa Ana and rare titles from San Jose. They started having a Santa Ana office maybe a year ago and it has sped things up considerably. It used to be a 4 day turn around(2 days there, 2 days back), now it is sometimes 2 days. I don't rent many discs(I tend to keep each disc a few days, even a coupla weeks when I'm busy) so I rarely experienced the waiting list thing. I'm not argueing with Netflix's secret policy since it happens to fit my needs=D.

-DJ