Joanna Trollope

Clearly this book is brilliant

PS3 LoveFilm - Utterly Useless

Stupidity on the PS3
Anyone who's updated their PS3 recently will have noticed, perhaps with excitement, their film menu now has a 'Love Film' application. "Sweet!" you might exclaim, but that will be short lived as their application is utterly pathetic.

First fail: there is no option to have an account that only allows streaming through your PS3 so you have to pay for a DVD by post even though that is frankly pointless when you have a PS3 capable of streaming the very film you wait two days to receive and might be scratched when you get it. Sure you get the extras on a DVD, but really is that worth the hassle?

Second fail: the cheapest account (£5.99) gives you 2 hours of streaming time. At the 120th minute Love Film tell me your streaming JUST STOPS. Seeing as most films these days seem to be over 2 hours this must be as frustrating as hell. And considering how poorly the application seems to be put together I doubt you will be alerted beforehand that the film you've chosen will not be watchable. Why would they not make it so that you can get only one film streamed in it's entirety and no more - clearly this 2 hour is ment to represent this.

Third fail: the application itself advertises the £8.16 account as the cheapest account and makes no mention of the £5.99 option. It's only if you're willing to pay £9.99 can you get unlimited viewing.

Forth fail (and this is just not acceptable): you can't quit the application. Seriously, you can't. Pressing the PS3 button - the method used for quitting ALL playstation applications does nothing. Actually, no, it does something - it shows a red warning saying "that operation is not allowed"! WTF? I wrote straight to LoveFilm to ask what has gone wrong and they confirmed that you can't quit the application. The only way to quit is to hold down the PS3 button for five seconds which essentially brings up the PS3 equivalent to Ctrl-Alt-Delete to force quit the application. What utter stupidity, I just can't believe the shocking lack of any though put into this program.

Utter idiocracy.