Company that owns Screenclick.com goes bust

The company behind Screenclick. com, a DVD rental service that operated using the postal network, has gone bust.

Diarmuid Lynam, an experienced Dublin-based insolvency practitioner, was appointed as liquidator to Dvdrentals.ie, the owner of Screenclick, in the run-up to Christmas.

Documents filed in the Companies Registration Office state the company is being wound up voluntarily because “it cannot by reasons of its liabilities continue”. The decision to wind up the company was taken after a meeting of the company’s creditors in a hotel near Dublin airport.

The company, which previously had a turnover in excess of €1 million and employed about 12 staff, operated from an address in Blackrock in Dublin. It has an unpaid judgment registered against it by Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown council.

Its most recent filed accounts, for 2013, show it was loss-making, while its biggest asset was listed as €1 million attributed to its ownership of a subscriber list, including the customer list of Movie-Star, which it bought for almost €250,000.

Screenclick operated as a membership service and was set up in 2001. Members selected films from the Screenclick website, which were then posted to them for a monthly fee.

They returned the DVDs in prepaid envelopes and then chose new ones for the following month.

Its previous partnerships included the Movies by Mail service with An Post.

Since Screenclick launched, however, web-based streaming services such as Netflix have had a major impact on such postal services.