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PC Magazine Peerflix review

PC Magazine has a review of Peerflix up and gives the service a 3.5 out of 5.

If you don't like what you bought, you can always trade it away for something better. The downside? The selection is spotty; it's a bit of the chicken-and-egg problem. The more people use it, the better it will get, but right now, Peerflix is missing a lot of popular movies. By "missing" I mean that although they're in the Peerflix system, not enough people have offered them up for trade. New releases in particular are hard to come by, since people have to buy and watch them before offering them up for trade in Peerflix. Once a DVD comes out, it will be a little while before lots of people buy it, get tired of it, and decide to trade it.

Is it worth signing up? If you're a bit adventurous and can bear to part with some of your DVDs, I say give Peerflix a whirl.

I’ve been a member of Peerflix since January 2005 and I find it pretty useful. I don’t use it to “rent” movies, I use it to exhange DVD’s I’ll never watch again or shouldn’t have bought in the first place. I traded a fullscreen copy of a movie I accidentally bought for the widescreen version and it only cost me one dollar.

Originally there was a real problem ever getting people to request or send DVD’s because there wasn’t enough people using the service. Now it’s much more active, but it’s also now seemingly full of people trying to unload unplayable discs. Of the last four DVD’s sent to me, two were completely unplayable at several points in the movie, one was the wrong version of the movie, and one never showed up. Fortunately the “PeerSafe Protection” program works, it’s just annoying to have to deal with it so often.

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