Rent DVDs By Mail

Instead of trekking down to your local video hut in order to hunt for movies and games on barren shelves, you might want to sign up for an online DVD subscription service. Most of these subscriptions services employ very customer-friendly business models. You merely pay a flat fee or monthly fee to participate. Once you are a member, you can rent anywhere from three to a dozen DVDs at a time and never have to pay late fees.

Once you finish watching a DVD, you simply place it in a prepaid return mailer and ship it back to the company. The process is simple, you don't have to waste time standing in line at a video store, and you get to create a large lineup of priority movies. Moreover, subscription services usually have far wider catalogs of potential DVD and game rentals.

Before you sign up for a service, check into their contingency plans. If a DVD arrives scratched--or fails to arrive at all--what is the company's policy? Can you get membership privileges for bulk rentals, or qualify for rewards for inviting friends and family into the service? Finally, does the company fight identity theft by ensuring that your personal and credit information will be stored safely in secure databases?

A few years ago, only cutting-edge internet-savvy consumers rented DVDs online; today, hundreds of thousands of Americans get their movies over the Web. As the process becomes more mainstream, we will likely see the brick-and-mortar rental agencies attempt to encroach on the market. Already, the big players like Blockbuster and Hollywood Video have been forced to change their rental policies to compete with DVD mail rental servers. It's very possible we'll continue to see more of this.