Netflix vs LoveFilm Instant: which is best?
Netflix and LoveFilm Instant are the two best-known movie
streaming services in the UK. You pay £5.99 every month and you can watch as
much of the giant library of TV episodes and films on the services as you like.
Many people are using platforms like Netflix to trade in their own scheduled TV
watching. However, which one is better – LoveFilm or Netflix?
Which is available on the most platforms?
Netflix has an immediate advantage as it supports the most
platforms. Indeed, it's hard to
LoveFilm Instant's platform support is strong in many areas,
but it has one or two serious omissions.
The worst of these is that lack of a proper Android app.
LoveFilm has an Android app, but it only lets you watch trailers and manage
your queue for disc delivery.
Other notable absentees are a dedicated Windows 8/RT app,
Apple TV, Panasonic TVs and Roku.
If you're an Android phone or tablet owner, or want the
absolute best compatibility possible, Netflix is the victor here.
Winner: Netflix
Which is easier to use?
Netflix has a more consistent user interface than LoveFilm.
Its ‘lean back’ interfaces for games console and TVs are simpler, and unlike
LoveFilm, the web interface doesn’t feel completely different to the other
means of using the service.
LoveFilm Instant’s issue is that it is still tied to the DVD
rental that remains a key part of LoveFilm as a whole. It also feels as though
less care has been put into the design of its more casual interfaces – used in
games consoles and the like. It’s a bit fiddlier – although the experience of
searching for a film is still the same scroll fest as it is on Netflix.
Some of you may like LoveFilm’s web-based interface as it
lets you see how exactly how many films are available in each genre. But it
isn’t pretty. And it is a bit dated.
Winner: Netflix
Netflix vs LoveFilm Instant: Which has the better film
selection?
The unfortunate truth is that the film selections on both
Netflix and LoveFilm are not going to be enough to fully satisfy the needs of a
true film fanatic. Neither has brand-new films and neither has a truly
gargantuan library. Each has a few thousand films - including plenty of
rubbish.
Both are subject to the
rights negotiations that are part of
any streaming service, and thanks to their sparring for top films, there’s not
a massive amount of crossover between the two.
Subscribing to both services isn’t a terrible idea if you want the best
streaming library on tap. Sky’s Now TV is the third part of the holy trinity,
supplying some newer films than neither Netflix or LoveFilm have.
LoveFilm arguably retains a slight edge, with seemingly a
little more legacy movie content than Netflix. However, it’s not quite the easy
victory it was eighteen months ago. Both services get a B- for film selection.
Winner: It's a draw
Netflix vs LoveFilm Instant: Which has the better TV series
selection?
Netflix offers a significantly better TV library than
LoveFilm. It has a wealth of US TV shows in particular (and plenty of UK ones),
and benefits from shows that Netflix itself has commissioned.
Taking an HBO-like approach to its commissioning, the
majority of Netflix Originals shows so far have been excellent, including the
remake of House of Cards, Orange is the New Black and Lillyhammer.
LoveFilm has a decent TV selection, but there are far more
notable holes in its library. Navigating through the TV library is also a
little trickier.
LoveFilm likes to split up seasons of shows as separate
entities, while Netflix’s structure piles all seasons of an episode into a
single show, making your progress in a show much easier to keep track of. Much
as with the film selection, there are a few odd little gems in the LoveFilm
line-up, including lots of retro kids' TV shows.
Winner: Netflix
Netflix vs LoveFilm Instant: Which has better image quality?
Until earlier this year, it was pretty clear that Netflix
offered much better picture quality than LoveFilm. It introduced HD-quality
streams earlier, and higher bit-rate, 1080p 'Super HD' quality video. It even
plans to bring 4K streams to the service next year.
LoveFilm Instant introduced HD-quality streams in 2012, but
1080p video was only available on desktops at first. However, now 1080p is also
available on PS3 - it only arrived very recently.
We performed a couple of our own image quality using the
desktop versions of Netflix and LoveFilm Instant to see which looks better
under optimal conditions. As you might expect, the tests vary between source –
and there aren’t all that many top films that are available from both services.
We went for Pixar’s Up and another Disney movie, Race to
Witch Mountain. Although fairly evenly matched with HD content, Netflix tends
to look sharper at times, and this seems to be particularly evident with
motion. Netflix maintains a more definite impression of sharpness, which may be
down to the codec and encoding practices used.
Despite being advertised as HD on the LoveFilm's player,
Race to Witch Mountain certainly doesn’t look like 1080p quality next to the
sharper Netflix feed. There is some confusion here, though, as while the
LoveFilm web player suggests it’s an HD film, its entry doesn’t actually have
an ‘HD’ sticker on the website.
Screengrabs from Pixar's Up show comparable video quality
Investigating a bit further, we checked out one of the
trickiest to encode scenes around – a shot of thousands of birds flying in
formation, taken from the intro to BBC’s Planet Earth nature documentary.
Despite looking excellent elsewhere in the video, the encoder seems to fall
down when trying to reproduce this scene, turning it into mush in parts. We
repeatedly played this scene to ensure LoveFilm wasn’t stepped down to a 480p
stream, but Netflix continued to outperform LoveFilm.
It’s also worth noting that LoveFilm doesn’t offer its
highest-quality streaming across all platforms.
Although not too visible in the resized images above, the
pixel crop shows some of the mushy digital artefacting that you see more in
LoveFilm than Netflix.
But which has the most HD-quality movies? It’s somewhat hard
to tell. LoveFilm publishes its film roster (there are 2,746 films and 1,067 TV
‘items’ at the time of writing), but no longer offers a separate HD section on
its website.
Winner: Netflix
Netflix vs LoveFilm Instant: Which has better sound quality?
Much like picture quality, Netflix is generally ahead in
sound quality. Most of its new content is delivered with 5.1 surround, and
surround sound is available on game consoles, through a computer and through
Apple TV.
LoveFilm does offer surround, but it’s a little behind in
terms of roll-out – it has only just come to PS3. And less of the library
offers surround sound, from our investigation.
Winner: Netflix
Verdict
The conclusion should be fairly clear by now – if you sign
up for a single streaming service out of Netflix and LoveFilm, we recommend
Netflix. Better cross-platform support, a better catalogue all-round and
superior sound and video quality make it the clear winner. However, it’s worth
considering subscribing to both if you want to make all your viewing streamed.
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