Cinemaparadiso.co.uk is another player in the burgeoning market of online DVD hire subscription services and in our opinion they are currently ranked as the 'best of the rest' outside the top three big players in this market. We particularly recommend them to fans of arthouse films and world cinema as this is an area in which they shine, featuring rental selections from over 20 countries. For overall choice Cinemaparadiso doesn't have quite the same clout as the big players when it comes to the size of the rental catalogue with around 17,000 titles as opposed to somewhere like ScreenSelect or Lovefilm which both claim to stock over 35,000 DVDs for renting by mail each. Recently they acquired the Zoovies service which would sugget a desire to expand so expect this figure to rise accordingly.
Cinema Paradiso has changed its format recently and now offers four different subscription packages, consisting of two limited and 2 unlimited rental formats. For those who are only likely to rent 3 or 4 movies a month there is a 3 disc and 4 disc limited package for £5.99 and £7.99 respectively giving you rentals for approximately £2 each as opposed to the average high street rental price of £3 per title and higher. When you consider you can keep a DVD from here for as long as you like and incur no late fees or other charges, this works out as a nice saving over time.
For more frequent movie watchers, there are two unlimited rental packages which allow you to rent as many movies as you like each month, limited only by how quickly you can watch and return them in order to get your next title sent out. For a 1 at a time package (allowing you to keep one DVD at home at a time) it's £9.49 a month whilst for two at a time you pay £12.49. The advantage of a two-at-once package is that it allows you to have one DVD at home ready to watch whilst your other is in transit to or from the rental company meaning you always (or most of the time anyway) have something at home to watch. Both limited and unlimited packages are competitively priced against the other major online UK movie rental companies.
Cinemaparadiso does offer a free trial to new members but only on their limited packages which you can upgrade from if you are happy with the service. You get a full month free but in this case that is limited to 3 or 4 discs depending on which package you choose. Your trial gives you full access to all the features provide with one small limitation in that new releases (those less than a month old) are given to paying members first so you are unlikely to see any during your trial period. That's just a heads up for you in case you are surprised to see your top choice titles skipped over during your trial period - if they're all brand new releases it's because the paying customers come first...as they should.
In terms of design and ease of use, Cinemaparadiso has a very simple interface which although offering vastly less features in some senses than the big 3 or 4 UK rental companies also allows for a much cleaner, faster browsing experience. Modem users like myself will appreciate not having to wait for bulky pages full of graphical fluff to load and selection of you wish list is very simple. A past gripe about Cinemaparadiso was the lack of user ratings and reviews but this has been covered now and you will find both on the site.
In all, we are fans of the Cinemaparadiso service and have only rated them less than five stars because their selection isn't as comprehensive as others and the lack of a 3 at a time package, which is a popular choice elsewhere, seems to limit the options for more avid movie watchers.
