Canadian DVD Rental Info pages - Archived 2007
Updated Monday, November 26, 2007.

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about

I've put together some information on the various Canadian DVD rent-by-mail companies. I've tried by various means to both estimate the number of titles they have in their inventory, and also tested their selection against a database of movies I've created for my own use. I'm currently a happy ZIP.ca customer, and have tried some of the others. I hope this proves helpful.

David Oberst, Yellowknife, NWT [email to:
For the morbidly interested, here are some details on how I did this.

This is an archived copy of the old homepage from November 2007, before I joined Zip.ca

Inventory Comparison - As well as the movies I've been renting, my testing database also has most movies given 4 stars by Roger Ebert from 1985-2003, which should provide a more representative sample. I've also loaded in the entire Criterion list of titles, and have given separate results for Criterion and non-Criterion DVDs, since their titles tend to skew to the esoteric. The "non-Criterion" result is probably the most useful measure. I've included my best guess as to the inventory size as well - most of the numbers are as of the end of July, but I'll try and keep the major companies as up to date as possible. I've also added a link for some of the larger companies to a page listing the titles from my database that they are "missing".

If you want to do you own checks on inventory at the various companies, I've created a search page which lets you enter a title and do a search with any of the companies' search engines.

 Company Name 
 Location 		Inventory
Estimate		NON-Criterion
815		Criterion editions
364		Full Database
1179		Missing
list
ZIP 1
Ottawa		54979
353 Blu-Ray   321 HD DVD		98%
(802)		95%
(349)		97%
(1151)		Full
ZIP also powers the Rogers Video Direct service
Cinemail
Winnipeg		2533093%
(763)		88%
(321)		91%
(1084)		Full
Canflix 2
Alberta		10000+
(Virtual: 26324)
121 Blu-Ray   134 HD DVD
(plus 499 games.)		56%
(461) (virtual 90%)		9%
(35) (virtual 57%)		42%
(496) (virtual 80%)		Full
DVDflix
Vancouver		967064%
(529)		7%
(27)		47%
(556)		Partial
DVDhype
Montreal		1054054%
(445)		26%
(95)		45%
(540)		Partial
Videomatica
Vancouver		15642
(Virtual: 16076)		83%
(683) (virtual 86%)		93%
(341) (virtual 98%)		86%
(1024) (virtual 90%)		Full
Smallfry
Relay 3
Ottawa		3343
(Virtual: 3521)		36%
(300) (+7)		4%
(16) (+7)		26%
(316) (+14)		Partial
Cyberflix
Kitchener, ON		432227%
(223)		3%
(14)		20%
(237)		Partial
Premieres
Kitchener, ON		4531
(Virtual: 5367)		23%
(189) (virtual 24%)		19%
(70) (virtual 23%)		21%
(259) (virtual 24%)		Partial
Other Companies include DVDZap (French website),  Pyasa (Hindi), OWCO.ca (Chinese)
The Doghouse
Starflix 4
Montreal		Indeterminate
NOT 30,000 as claimed		49%
(402)		6%
(24)		36%
(426)		Full

Footnotes
1 ZIP likely has another 400 or so titles in stock, based on random sampling of the 13,000+ listings they added in late June.
2 Canflix lists 25,000+ titles, but does not currently stock many of them - the main counts exclude these while the "virtual" value includes them. Availability of these titles (marked "Ready to Order") will depend on future Canflix purchasing decisions. See the Canflix FAQ for more information.
3 For Relay I've also show the number they claim to have "on order", but it isn't reflected in their percentages, as most of these have been "on order" for months.
4 Starflix appears to wildly inflate their inventory claims - see my notes for more details.