I don't know if they've changed it, but when I had Lovefilm (late 2011) I found that they sent a huge amount of personal information to advertisers.
This included what movies you were looking at (even if you just looked at a movie page without watching it), your postal code, which lovefilm package you were subbed to, if you had games consoles, how long you were a member for, etc.
Meanwhile Netflix seem desperate to link my Netflix and Facebook accounts (which I have no interest in doing), so much so that I have to make sure I'm signed out of Facebook before even going near the Netflix site.
If you're a lovefilm subscriber go to one of the movie pages and look at the network requests (you can do it with chrome inspector), it used to be the case all the information was encoded in the calls to Doubleclick.
This roughly mirrors my experience with the libraries on offer here. Unfortunately both companies are fucked over by Sky, who have exclusive contracts with pretty much every publisher and block anyone else from getting new movies for roughly a year after release. Netflix threatened to take them to court over this a year or so ago; kinda hoping they follow through on that.
As a UK resident who has tried both I can confirm this. And even with both the selection is still pretty limited. It's frustrating, as since signing up to spotify a couple of years ago, I no longer buy CDs, yet (in the UK at least) there is no comparable service for films and TV shows.
There is also NOW TV in the UK, which is a standalone Sky service. Somehow they don't get too much press, but they do have loads of recent movies (basically everything Sky).
Yes, it's true that Now TV are relatively unknown despite a great catalogue.
The upside is that they have much more recent movies than other services.
The downside is that it is much more expensive than Netflix and Lovefilm combined (£9 for 3 months and £15 p/m thereafter).
It depends what you are looking for really. You can actually compare Now TV with the other service providers at Tank Top Movies in case you want to see how they stack up.
Since I am hearing impaired, the two are not even close to being comparable, as one has subtitles (closed captions) for most movies & tv series, the other only offers subtitles in non-English movies.
It's quite sad :|
Does the US have a broader selection of content on netflix?
I'm in the UK and subscribed for a month, but didn't see what all the fuss was about.
Apart from House of cards (which was worth one month on it's own, but I got that month for free), it was a collection of "Stuff I already watched years ago" and "Stuff that is mediocre at best".
Oh yeah, loads, loads and loads of difference. Some of my UK friends even use proxy DNS service to get the US content (same account works in both countries) because the UK content is threadbare in comparison.
I think this is happening in US as well. Amazon is picking up expensive contracts that Netflix drops or passes on. It seems perfectly reasonable to pay for both services if you aren't paying for overlapping content rights. Since Netflix doesn't appear to have plans to go to higher price points themselves, the opportunity is there for Amazon to fill in.
BlinkBox has a lot of movies, and lots from the last year or so where netflix + lovefilm tail off - but obviously you're paying for every movie on BlinkBox. We can post a similar graph for them if there's interest.
This included what movies you were looking at (even if you just looked at a movie page without watching it), your postal code, which lovefilm package you were subbed to, if you had games consoles, how long you were a member for, etc.
This data wasn't even sent over SSL.
Completely killed lovefilm as an option for me.