Anyone rented from GREENCINE? If so, do you recommend it?

Yep. Excellent selection; relatively fast shipping. They don't have wharehouses everywhere, so might take a bit longer to reach you on the East Coast.

Double post. Ooops.

They're very good. The best part is that they're a smaller organization. If you have a problem at Netflix, it takes some time and effort to get it resolved. At Greencine, it's much easier - you just sent off a quick message and you'll get a real human being who responds to you.
Also, Greencine has a significantly better selection of non-new release films.

I'm sure Netflix started out this way as well. The trick is to maintain the personal service as you grow and expand.

Customer service was great, but they lost me before my free trial was up. The first three DVDs rented were not what they advertised them to be. I rented:
1. Crouching Tiger Superbit- Superbit was pictured, but I received the regular.
2. The Tai-Chi Master- Pictured the Tai-Chi Master, but sent the Dimension cut and chop version.
3. Honestly don't remember the third, but it was the same as above, the Dimension cut and chop job is what I recieved.

The customer service rep said they use an independant source for pictures and description and that they would fix it, but it happens. I told them I don't care for anime (their biggest and fastest growing section) and only signed up for HK import rentals, so we parted ways.

If you enjoy non-mainstream stuff and anime, go for it, but for regular releases, you are better off with Netflix.


Chris

To the extent anyone is still interested in the "old" thread, I cancelled my GC sub after about six months in which there were perennial issues.  Some of them included very slow arrival of discs to me and in-processing of discs I mailed back to GC.  I live in L.A. and the shipment center is local (Canoga Park, San Fernando Valley).  But Netflix is at about a 98% success rate regarding one-day arrival and return of discs (and the distrib center that services L.A. is farther away from me in Orange County).  GC repeatedly took two to three days or more to turn discs around.  They tend to always blame the post office when at one point I got Delivery Confirmation proof that the USPS was not always the culprit.

 

Something I originally thought would be a terrific boon that Nf doesn't offer is Quick Return:  you can indicate at the site that you've mailed back a disc and doing so starts the shipping process of your next queued title.  (But you'd only get same-day shipment of your next queued title if you did the Quick Return before about 11 am.)  But the Quick Returned disc has to be received by GC before they will permit a second disc to be Quick Returned.  Sometimes their in-processing of discs was so slow, I'd finish a second title and want to Quick Return it but couldn't because the prior Quick Return had not been received.

 

They also list titles at their site which they do not readily have available for rent.  For instance, Everyone Says I Love You had a color other than green (indicating limited availability) for over three months.  One of the few benefits GC may have over Nf, namely the availability of some titles that Nf only permits you to add to the Saved section of your queue, is undercut by the lack of ready availability of many of those titles.

 

An earlier poster mentioned tedium in getting issues resolved with Nf.  That may have been the case back in 2003 but it's certainly not my experience now.  Whenever I've called Nf in recent years (I've been a customer since 2004), the issue is usually promptly resolved, sometimes including an extra disc being sent to me as a concession gesture.  Nf was criticized back in the day for not having a customer service phone number.  They have one now.  GC does not.  On top of no phone number, they are also slow to respond to e-mail.

 

Especially problematic is their tendency to delete critical posts from the feedback forum at their site's discussion forum.

 

I don't know this for sure but FWIW, I think the company has roots in the porn industry.  They moved their distribution center from San Francisco to the Valley and it's noteworthy/curious that you can add porn titles from what appears to be a sister site, bluecine.com, to your GC queue.