Farewell FetchMeMovies, Hello QuickFlix

For the last couple of years we have been subscribed to an online DVD service called FetchMeMovies. This is a Telstra BigPond service and was one of the first in the Australian market. We subscribed because living outside the cities our choice of DVD's from the local stores was a bit limited. The FetchMeMovies service gave us access to a much larger range of DVD's.

But for the last year we've been getting frustrated with aspects of the service. One aspect is that the condition of the DVD's is often poor and we've had to return quite a few as unplayable. But the main reason for our frustration is how very slow the website is. Your main way of interacting with the service is through the website hence it is obviously important that this works well. Interestingly the site is easy to use. You can do most of the things you need to do without too much thought. But you can often make yourself a cuppa while waiting for the next page request to appear.

QuickFlix is either a new service or an old service that's suddenly found it's marketing department. Either way our frustration with FetchMeMovies motivated us to use their free trial. In our tests we looked at the range of DVD's available (everything we could get from FetchMe was available through QuickFlix), speed of turnaround, condition of the disks and most importantly the speed and usability of the website. In most areas both services where on a par but when it came to site speed the difference was 10 to 1 (i.e I could load 10 QuickFlix pages to one FetchMe page). I won't pretend to guess why FetchMe's site is so slow (thats their problem) but this has made me realise just how important speed is. I guess if the usability had been poor I might have left earlier. But in the end I still left.