Tuesday, May 01, 2007

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.

6 comments:

Unknown said...

I rather missed the friendly looking dog that appeared on the original fetchmemovies website. :-)

geekglue said...

Thanks for the comment Roland. It's a while since I wrote this and re-reading through I'm remembering how bad the FetchMe service was. It's probably worth saying here that we're still very happy with Quickflix.

Anonymous said...

Great to read things are still going well with the Quickflix service GG.

Adam Q
quicflix.blogspot.com

geekglue said...

Thanks for the comment Adam. We did receive a nice letter from the BigPond Movies (was FetchMe) the other day. They finally noticed that we weren't using the service anymore and offered an incentive to try it again. But it wasn't a good enough incentive to tempt me back too their remarkably slow servers. Really Quickflix rules. Well done guys.

Anonymous said...

Quickflix has the worst customer service ever. Delivery is so slow. Yes they have a great range but with long waits listed on so many titles you have to wonder if they own all those titles, I think not. So if you are prepared to wait FOREVER for a movie, join up. Unlimited movies - no way, two at a time - yes maybe if you wait two weeks!

geekglue said...

Sorry to hear you've found their service slow. I'm still using QuickFlix and on average discs arrive two days after returning the last disc. There are some discs that you put on your list and you never seem to get them. But they've recently updated the system to let you know when a disc has a long wait. At least then you have information and can make a choice. They are still a lot better than the Telstra service was and the discs are in much better condition when they arrive.