e-consultancy interviewed William Reeve, Chief Operating Officer for LOVEFiLM.

There are some nice topics discussed about the business of DVD rentals, movie downloads and an internal Hackathon.

Here are some snippets from the interview, ending with some questions from myself.

William on the LOVEFiLM Hackathon

We see you recently held a Hackathon to generate new ideas for the business. How did it go?
It went really well. I read something about Facebook doing a Hackathon and looked up what it was on Wikipedia, and we invented a way of doing it ourselves.

When do you plan to hold the next one?
We have a code freeze at Christmas and we’re going to do use that time to do another one.

I think we’ll aim to do it roughly quarterly from then on. We got some really good quality ideas and everyone that did it enjoyed it.

Q What else was made during the Hackathon, and will the public ever get to see the products even just to have a vote to say if they go live?

Q The first Hackathon and the next one seem to be an internal project, will LOVEFiLM take the example of Facebook and open up the Hackathon to the public developers?

William on movie downloads

How is your download service going, in terms of subscribers?
It’s going. The issue is that we’re not offering as good value on it as we’d like to. We’re all about convenience and good value. Although it’s competitively priced, it’s not something I could tell my friends they should use.

Q With the download to own not going so well, why promote and use it, will LOVEFiLM provide a service like Netflix’s watch instantly?

The questions are probably some of many that William Reeve gets everyday, so i didn’t want to go overboard and there is a fair chance he won’t see this post to answer them, but if you have your own questions then please post them below. Maybe they will get an answer.

Read the full interview on e-consultancy.com, its a nice insight into a growing company, now at 500,000 subscribers, thats a lot of movie watching!