Netflix

[Balok]

For starters you don't get the movie you want, when you want it. You make a bunch of selections and they send you something that you picked-just not necessarilty what you wanted to see most.

This isn't quite my experience. Most of the time they send me what's at the top of my queue. Occasioanlly, that movie has a wait (because all the copies have been sent to others); when that happens, I get the second in my queue [1]. They have never dipped lower than the second in my queue for me, and they've only done that a couple of times.

[1] If the top of your queue is one of the discs in a television series set, they will skip past succeeding discs in the same series set (series sets are one season of one show). I regard this as correct because usually, you don't want disc 3 of a season unless you've watched disc 2. So if disc 2 isn't available, I want them to skip discs 3, 4, etc.

There are lots of info online about people who order a lot of movies each month being put on the bottom of the list for selections

Netflix definitely does this; they admit to it in their terms of service, although you have to read carefully to understand that this is what they mean.

[spyone]

I've never used Netflix, but I've considered it. If I spent $10 a month on DVD rental, I'd be really tempted to give my $10 to Netflix instead. However, I generally spend $20 a few times a year on DVDs.

I have found something that works out well for me:
I live close to several EB Games and GameStop outlets, all of which sell used DVDs. I have found the condition uniformly good, and usually one or the other of them is running a "Buy 2 get 1 free" sale, so for under $20 I can pick up 3 titles.
If I don't want to keep the movie, I can sell it back to them, usually for about $5 in store credit, so I wind up paying about $5 for 3 "rentals", and I don't have to worry about getting them back on time.
And if I like the movie and want to keep it, I only payed around $6 for it.

The down side? Well, you are limited to what they have, and usually they don't have any "new releases".
But occasionally you can find a real gem: I got two box sets of Robotech episodes (each box has two DVDs with 6 episodes each, plus one DVD of extras) in the original shrink wrap for $19 each, and my niece got a whole bunch (like 10+) of Inuyasha DVDs for Christmas.