General DVD rental question

[parahandy]

Just wondering...

How many copies of each title do DVD rental companies keep aside for rental?
And (as I have had to do twice now with Amazon), if I notify them that I returned a DVD but they haven't received it, do they simply take another one off the shelf?

[qpw3141]

It's hard to say.

Sometimes you have to wait months for something that you'd think they should have plenty of (eg an eighteen month old blockbuster), and sometimes you get a newly released item almost straight away.

Sometimes their behaviour is weird. I've been waiting six months for Sopranos S5 disk 1 (ScreenSelect), so I suspect that all the copies they had are either lost or damaged, and they are not bothering to get anymore.

Certainly they do just take another copy off the shelf if they've got it. I once had to try 5 times to get a playable version of a DVD. It was obvious that the person 'ahead' of me in the queue had a damaged player as each disk was damaged in the same way (but they were not the same disks being returned as the damage was slightly different on each).

[rua]

Not sure if this is the same with dvd rental companies but theres a games rental company that buys in about 10 copies of each new release unless its rumoured to be a major seller when they buy more.

A few months later they sell them on as ex-rental and just keep 1 or 2 copies of each game, which is why it can take a while to get older games.

I know Blockbuster high street stores do this and sell the dvds instore as ex rental, can only presume online dvd rental is the same.