My experience with Videoisland

[Bex]

I'm new to this site, and I think it's great! I've enjoyed reading the reviews and I thought I would share my experiences.

I tried Videoisland first, as Greasypalm offerred cashback for taking out a free 2 week trial with them.

PROs

As soon as I joined DVDs were selected from my list to send out, and I received them the next day.
There seems to be a very good selection of DVDs.
The site allows you to prioritise your rental list by placing films in three categories depending on how urgently you want them. I found that all my top choices were sent out during the free trial, which pleased me.
You can also assign the DVDs in your rental list to different people. They suggest that you use this feature if you are sharing a subscription [e.g. flatmates], but it's also useful for families, to make sure you get a mix of adult and childrens films. This is one feature I will miss when I cancel my membership.
The site can suggest films for you to watch, based on your ratings of films you've watched. I rated 40 DVDs, but the site didn't come up with any suggestions. I don't know how many you need to rate to get a suggestion. If this feature worked well, it would be useful.
You can suggest DVDs for inclusion in their list. I suggested one and received a reply pretty quickly.
With some DVDs there is an option to keep them, at what seems to be less than the usual retail price. I thought that this was another useful feature.

CONs

DVDs seemed to take a while to show as returned. Whether this was down to the mail service or to Videoisland I'm not sure. Either way, this was frustrating as I'd been assuming that usually DVDs would arrive and be turned around the day after posting. I did notice that the site seemed to be updated in the evening, rather than during the day. The slow turnaround would definitely be an adverse factor in deciding whether to use the site, as this could easily half the number of DVDs you get for your money. It's a pity the trial was only two weeks as I didn't get a chance to see if this continued or improved.
Although I like the option to purchase some of the DVDs you rent, I thought the price was rather high considering these are ex-rental DVDs. If you want the DVD case, you have to pay an extra £1.99 - why?
The price is certainly not the cheapest. For the 3 DVD option, it's £17.34 a month. It looks as if this will go down when they merge with Screenselect. In view of this, if I wanted to continue to paid membership I would join Screenselect [£14.99 a month] instead of Videoisland.

[Marty73]

I like their website.... and that's about it. Their service, ie: turn-around of sending a new DVD is by far the slowest of the 8 dvd companies I'm trialing right now. When I first signed up, it took 2 days before anything was sent and now it's been 3 days since I last returned the DVD's I first rented and nothing new has been sent. Pathetic - I do not recommended Video Island.

[JohnC]

Strange. I’m with Tesco and the turnaround time is pretty good. There seems to be no consistency to the service that different people get from these companies.

[Marty73]

Well, VideoIsland have finally sent 3 new dvd's today, after 2-3 days. It's true in that when you return your dvd's, days go by before they show as returned on their site. Whereas ScreenSelect, LoveFilm and DVD's365 indicate your discs have been returned safely the following morning in most cases, VideoIsland and others do not show this at all, and you only know they've got your DVD's back when they finally send you more DVD's, pretty crappy.. as is PostaDVD too. But true, everyone has a diferent experience.

[JohnC]

The Video Island site only seems to update in the evening. I’ve looked at the site before leaving work and seen that my old DVDs are still out, then returned home and found new ones on the doormat!

[sharkboy]

I've used Video Island for a few months now, having stumbled across them long before I discovered the delights of this site and its bounty of free trials.

They've never been the quickest at getting new discs out, although until recently they were still OK. But recent expreiences have totally turned me off them.

I received a faulty disc - it was very badly scraped (in some areas right down to the silver). It wouldn't play on 2 stand-alone players, nor on 3 DVD-ROMs. Like a good customer, I popped the disc back into the sleeve having marked it as faulty and filled in a faulty disc report on the site. Hell, I even ran a disc analysis and told them exactly what the faults were and what tracks were affected!

Days passed, and there were no new discs at all. My last few were all marked returned on the site, but there was absolutely no movement. "Maybe I need more titles" I thought (despite having about 115 titles in my list at the time!). So more were added, but still no discs. Finally 9 days after making the original report, I receive an e-mail thanking me for reporting a faulty disc. Strangely enough, the e-mail was dated the previous week- what, they'd think I wouldn't notice?

So onto the site I went to cancel my subscription. I was offered a 2-week free run so I took it to make up for the lost time. But once that's expired, thats it for me.

I guess the moral of this tale is sometimes you're probably better off just saying nothing!

[tiggins28]

Watch out with the 2 week VideoIsland extension. It's 2 weeks credit, not 2 weeks free. I've posted something about this in another thread.

In my experience (I've used Moviechoices, Blockbuster, VideoIsland, Screenselect) ScreenSelect is the only company that makes it worth reporting a dodgy disc on their website.

[nicola 33]

[pjfoley]

:cry: Just see my review........bunch of idiots there!!!