Lovefilm rebrands.

Commerce  Ever since Lovefilm, which is the primary way I watch films now, were bought by Amazon, I was waiting for the inevitable moment when it would rebrand.  The US logo appeared on envelopes was a pretty good indication and finally the announcement has been made and despite some initial fear that it would lead to the closure of by-post, as this Pocket-Lint primer indicates existing Lovefilm users will see no change other than the rebranding on the streaming app on the various devices.

There are some other changes.  A few years ago Lovefilm abandoned their experiment for streaming-on-demand newer releases and Amazon are bringing that back to, which is a bit of a concern because it might increase the lead time until they're available by post or "free" stream.  Studios are already delaying the rental release of some films often until months and months after they've appeared in the shop.  Man of Steel seemed to take aaaage (not that it mattered much in the end).

On the upside, now that it's practically the same service as on offer in the US it might mean that the Roku app from over there will finally migrate across.  The Sony app is fine, it does the job, but the picture quality is nowhere near as good as Netflix which is near blu-ray quality in HD even though they're both being delivered through the same broadband connection.

Of course, I'd be even happier if the Amazon Prime joy was spread in the opposite direction and bundled in with my Lovefilm subscription.  I just hope that it doesn't mean at some point Amazon simply abandon by-post as a dated anachronism.  There are still plenty of titles which are never streamed on either (now) Amazon Instant or Netflix and the availability gap would be even longer.  Sigh.