The launch of Netflix into the UK last week has no doubt left plenty of Brits agonising over which service to go for: Lovefilm or Netflix? Annoyingly, the ideal answer is both.

What I want from my movie streaming service is everything I might ever feel like watching available for me to watch it whenever I want. What I really don't want is to discover that the one thing I feel like watching is available on the one service I don't subscribe to.

Until last week, this wasn't too much of a problem. Amazon-owned Lovefilm had the subscription streaming market pretty much to itself in the UK – sure, you could rent films from BlinkBox and Apple, but that wasn't quite the same.

Now there are two major services going head to head – a bit of extra competition is a good thing, we thought. And when the Netflix launch saw Lovefilm instantly drop its streaming prices, we thought we were right.

Lovefilx

But as time wears on, it becomes less awesome and more annoying. Both Netflix and Lovefilm are scrambling to snap up content deals to out-do the other. While the business thinking behind this may be sound – offering something the other guy hasn't got – it's frustrating for the actual users of the services.

At the moment, Lovefilm has exclusive streaming rights to Studiocanal's movies – that will include Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy when it's released. It also has a five-year deal with Entertainment One in the UK, including the Twilight films. There are also two time-dependent deals with Sony Pictures and Warner Bros that see their titles come to Lovefilm first.

Those are some pretty heavy hitters – and Netflix only has Lionsgate to hit back with. It's a pretty good exclusive deal though, giving Netflix the exclusive on subscription streaming for Lionsgate films in the UK within one year of their release, including The Hunger Games, which is set to be 2012's Twilight.

If nothing else, won't somebody think of the tweens? How can we expect them to choose between Twillight and The Hunger Games?

So what's the answer? Well, you could hope one buys the other and becomes a mega-library, or just wait and see how it all pans out. Or you could suck it up and pay £11 a month to subscribe to both.

Netfilm

£11 a month isn't that much - it's only £1 more than Spotify, for comparison. But it's annoying and a bit unfair – you'd be paying twice for some content and still have to pay more on top of that for new releases and cinema visits.

The film industry is desperate to combat piracy and film streaming was the great white hope to do so. Fast, easy and affordable – that was the idea. But in practise it's becoming a sprawling behemoth of multiple accounts, additional extras and don't even get us started on actually finding new releases to stream via legitimate routes (YouTube, apps, websites, Facebook… where do you even begin?).

As far as we can see it, someone needs to come in and sort this whole mess out. This competition between Netflix and Lovefilm isn't going to result in any winners, so the movie studios need to start making fair deals and actually working with streaming services to make it easy and affordable for everyone to access everything they might want to watch.

Until then, the piracy sites – which already offer everything we might want to watch in one place at the unbeatable price of free – are going to keep taking home the gold.