quickflix

Quickflix – Australian DVD Rental Review

So I’m a poor Facebook gamer and I play a game that has offers to earn Facebook credits. One of those offers was 240 credits for trying Quickflix. I had wanted to try it anyway but wasnt game to spend that much money, so I paid my $2 trial fee and set about my business.

Imagine my excitement when I got DVDs in the mail. I about crapped my pants. My dreams were coming true! Finally! A Netflix like service down under! I watched those DVDs with gusto and I’ve been meaning to take them up the street to the postal box since but I havent.

That’s my major caveat with this sort of system in Australia. In America you put mail to be delivered in your own mail box and call ahead if you have a parcel…in Australia you walk your lazy ass to the nearest post box (which for me is about 100 meters away, a damn miracle, but even that’s agony).

Sunshine
The feeling of having DVDs delivered to your door and movies available to be streamed at your command!

Anyway I digress. Amongst the sunshine and euphoria I was experiencing I decided I wanted to watch some of the online streaming I’d come to possess for my $2 trial. I loaded up a movie called To Gillian on Her 37th Birthday and waited for buffering. I picked that movie because it was featured and I just wanted to watch something – so I had no attention span for searching through a catalogue.

Now there’s something you need to know about my laptop: I have to keep it on 30-50% volume because above that is too loud for me. I had this movie on 100% and it sounded like it was on 20%. I had to strain to hear. I had to turn the fan off in the adjoining room to even have a chance. Or use headphones….but what good’s that if you have friends next to you? Suddenly you notice they breathe like their lives depend on it; really loudly and interrupting the movie.

Quickflix Man
I probably had more euphoria than this guy, and he got more DVDs than me!

So I closed it. It was pretty crappy quality anyway. Stupid older movies. I went looking for a newer one but my friends and I decided we wanted to watch Flatliners instead. We made it through the movie only because we breathed in buffering breaks and there was absolutely nothing else to do at that point in time. We also decided we must all need glasses because everything was blurry and pixelated. It looked like there was water on the screen.

So my friends abandoned ship and I was left wondering where the sunshine was and since I felt cold in the lack of it I decided to get dressed and stop dancing around like a loony. With the high gone I started to notice how sour things were…

Winter by Andy Collins
How you feel when you realise you’ve just been screwed over by your dreams

Why Quickflix isnt worth the money

    1. Their prices are a little messed up (more on that later).
    2. It’s too expensive for what you can get.
    3. The Australian Postal system isn’t set up for it, so it’s not as convenient as it sounds. Yes you don’t have to go and get the DVDs but you do have to take them back so you might as well have, you’d at least get the DVDs faster.
    4. Our Australian internet isnt really ready for it either if you plan to do streaming – it’s got bandwidth limits and slower speeds than the states. Who wants to be shaped after watching a great movie? Who wants to have to wait 15 minutes just to get a quarter of the way into the movie without buffering?
    5. Streaming isnt worth it:
    6. Most of the streaming stuff is uninteresting, old, or not the sort of thing you’d hire from a video store.
    7. All of the streaming movies are about 1/5th of the volume your computer is displaying…at least in my experience (yes, the video players volume was on max, I’m not an idiot).
    8. Anything you stream is really bad quality visually, even on such a small screen (laptop remember!). While I understand that it cannot be perfect, there were WAVES of pixels in this sea. No really, they looked like waves.
    9. Did I mention most of it is stuff you don’t want to watch anyway?
    10. If you have a bunch of tabs open and you close the browser or shut down and come back you have to log into each and every tab again AND it wont redirect you back to where you were. By the time I’m done logging in I have to spend extra hours of my life to work out where the hell I was and getting back there.

I live on my PC. It also has a DVD player but I have a nice large TV available to me so I go and associate with people for my DVD viewing experiences. Afterwards I bathe in Detol but that’s another story.

The Horror!
Simulated horror, real thing coming as soon as I’m unshaped.

I use my PC for a LOT of my movie watching experiences….and I was SO excited to have streaming back in my life. When I was with the love of my life, Netflix, I would stream movies ALL THE TIME. I’d even sometimes watch them downstairs on the big screen because we had a little box from Netflix that let us watch instant videos on our TV…and it never buffered EVER on the TV for me. In fact I don’t remember it buffering past the first loading point on the PC either. So maybe my idea of speed and buffering are distorted….but the quality is SEVERELY lacking.

So I must go into the prices, because if my only real issue is the streaming I can suck it up and get DVDs with awesome quality. Right? Let’s have a look see at the prices:

Quickflix Packages

Now, just to be irritating let’s table that in Excel with some extra information and use some auto sums because I fail at math… Beforehand though let’s take a look at the possibility factor. I just spoke to Australia post about delivery duration on regular and reply paid envelopes, specifically regarding Quickflix mail. I was told about 2-3 days per delivery was the time frame either way.

For the sake of clarity let’s assume we have a 30 day month and it takes you a full day to watch a movie (because most people can’t watch and repost on the same day). That would be an even pattern which would not change monthly, where you would have 6 deliveries max assuming it takes 2 days to get to its destination (you or Quickflix). If it takes 3 days each way you would get 4 deliveries a month. With that in mind take the table below into account:

Package Max DVDs DVDs a Time Price DVDs a Month (2 days) Price Per DVD DVDs a Month (3 Days) Price Per DVD
Light 2 1 $5.99 2 $3.00 2 $3.00
Basic 4 2 $16.99 4 $4.25 4 $4.25
Regular 0 2 $22.99 12 $1.92 8 $2.87
Ultimate 0 3 $32.99 18 $1.83 12 $2.75

Why does it cost me more per DVD for the basic package than it does for the light? USUALLY things get cheaper as you buy more or get more into the packages, which happens with the last two packages. I’m kind of iffy about this because the basic package should be less per DVD than the light one, so the light one should be more expensive per DVD. The fact that they’re both miles away from the other two in terms of price confuses me too. It’s very messed up…if additional DVDs are supposed to cost MORE, why is it CHEAPER for me to buy additional DVDs on the basic package?

Here’s a table that takes the price of streaming into account as well (so if you’re on the light one just quit now and go to Kmart and buy one of those DVDs that has 5 in one):

Package Max DVDs DVDs a Time Price DVDs a Month (2 days) Price Per DVD DVDs a Month (3 Days) Price Per DVD
Light 2 1 $19.99 2 $10.00 2 $10.00
Basic 4 2 $24.99 4 $6.25 4 $6.25
Regular 0 2 $29.99 12 $2.50 8 $3.75
Ultimate 0 3 $39.99 18 $2.22 12 $3.33

So streaming is definitely not worth it, but it’s interesting to see the table anyway. Unless you’re going to watch a movie a night or every second night, I wouldnt do it. And even then, I just wouldnt do it because the quality is horrifying and if your internet is slow it just wont load, end of story. I could stream movies online free for better quality.

Quickflix has a lot of growing up to do before a movie buff like me will be satisfied. As for the pricing I’m still deciding on its worth to me personally but I suspect it will shortly become a thing of the past for me unless I can get my friends to join in for movie nights every week and split the costs.

Have you tried Quickflix? What did you think?

Subscribe
Notify of
guest

4 Comments
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
Walter Leeds
Walter Leeds
12 years ago

I don’t know if it is the same down under where you can checkout DVDs from the library. Have been doing that here. Now they don’t always have the latest and greatest but have a decent selection. Plus it is at my favorite price, free. I can only rent two at a time is the only limitation.

Jasmine2015
Jasmine2015
8 years ago

So “Quickflix” is supposed to be the Au version of our Netflix? From how it looks you might as well just go to the store and buy a DVD. I hate having a slow Internet connection. I don’t do a whole lot of steaming, but when I do I don’t expect too much buffering. I already grow impatient when YouTube starts to buffer.

4
0
Would love your thoughts, please comment.x
()
x