This week, the French online DVD rental company glowria.fr launched a new version of its site. The new look and feel is more than welcome compared to the austere previous version which had been online for the better part of this year.
Glowria.fr competes on the French market with a number of players. Nord Cinema recently gave it a similar top 9/10 ranking with Cinesnap.com. L'internaute has a more comprehensive comparison between French sites including glowria, cinesnap, DVDfly, Locafilm, DVDpost, DVDzag, and Cinehome.
These rankings do not seem to take into account the latest features just introduced at Glowria:
* catalogue: more than 3500 different titles, including movies, documentaries, sports, etc. How many movie titles can you name ? you should find most of what you like here. Other sites boast a bigger number of titles but you should ask yourself these questions:
- do they have enough stock per title to satisfy everyone, or do they have just one copy (glowria certainly takes this factor into account very seriously before promoting a new title).
- how much of that extra catalogue are porn movies? glowria being a family oriented company, it does not carry any adult movie. Think about it: although you may have 2 passwords on the site, the enveloppe that gets into every home is the same one. Kids can stumble accross X-rated movies, and glowria does not want to condone that.
By the way, glowria introduced real-time catalogue availability a few months ago. Although not prominently shown on the catalogue, you can access it by going into your program wish list: there all movies in your list have their availability displayed, hinting to you what next movie you are going to get. A step forward total transparency of the service ;) !
* Postal service: Glowria, as all of its competitors, relies exclusively on the postal system for delivery. Hence the time it takes for every exchange of movies by the post is independant of the company's will. And therefore delivery time is the same for all companies. Nevertheless, glowria innovates again: whenever you are done with viewing your movies, press the new Turbo mode on the site, and Glowria will send you the next movies without waiting your movies to come in. Glowria relies on its subscribers to use this new service with full honesty. This might cut down the delays up to a couple of days.
* Value proposition: the marketing message at the company has always been "consume like you would like to". Hence glowria introduced a new feature for the summer: if you are going on holidays, you can very easily choose to have your DVDs sent to your holiday location, or even to suspend the subscription: just reactivate it when you get back. You do not pay extra for this service.
And if you are already a member and if you like the service so much, by choosing to subscribe for 6 months minimum (lock up period), glowria will offer you an extra month FREE, bringing your total monthly subscription down by 1/7th, almost a 15% discount!
* Complements: glowria started promoting a couple of weeks ago a number of DVD players with Nomatica, so that you can enjoy your DVD experience better by buying a recent player. Not willing to invest yet ? Glowria has also partnered with CineTrain, the DVD player rental company to help you enjoy DVDs on your holidays ;)
* Many more member benefits are on their way, including exclusive deals with the family ISP AOL France, with DVD player manufacturer Philips, with mega retailer Carrefour, with leading TV magazine Telerama, etc.
By the way, just for you to know, I am a board member at glowria.
And from the grapevine, Blockbuster is finally preparing itself to enter the online DVD rental business. A beta version of the site has leaked to the online community (via HackingNetflix)
