BigFlix - a Movie Rental Service

Several months back I was introduced to "NetFlix" through quite a few blogposts on various sites. The company kept on making the rounds of media in various areas including the business model, the profit margins, the roadmap and all. Amidst all this, India also got it's own version of NetFlix in the form of seventymm.com and BigFlix after that.

I recently got introduced to "BigFlix" through one of my colleagues, Sameer, who also had introduced me to "librarywala.com". After having a fairly good with librarywala (it is majorly used by Meghana), I decided to try out BigFlix as well.

The online registration was pretty smooth, I got registered without any hassles or without requiring any phone calls. The Service had initial offering of 14days trial period, which worked out well. I could watch barely 2-3 movies in the trial period, but was happy with the quality of service, the quality of the DVDs received etc. So I decided to continue and opted for a quarterly plan. With the delivery address as office address, this worked out pretty well and I could exchange the DVDs without stepping out or without worrying about timing of the delivery boy. The Delivery Boy - Suraj - was a nice person and used to be punctual almost always. He also delivered the DVDs to my residence over the weekends couple of times, without any complaint :) A minor glitch happened in all this was due to changed company policy, where they have put up a restriction to carry any kind of digital media to be carried inside the premises. This forced me to deposit my DVDs at the security everyday I wanted them to be exchanged and this involved making in and out entries on all those days.

The main advantage I was looking forward to was the option to watch the old movies, which I had missed in my school days or college days or days even prior to that and which do not make to the TV channels so often. I am tired of watching "Welcome", "No Entry", "Malamal Weekly" and likes of them. Now that a quarter is passed and I have canceled the subscription for now, here are some interesting statistics:
  • Total movies rented: 27
  • Total movies watched: 25 (I returned two of them without watching as I lost interest by the time I got to watch them :( )
  • English movies: 12
  • Hindi movies: 15
  • Marathi movies: 0 (This is majorly because there is not much choice yet available in Marathi and I have watched many of them on Doordarashan in childhood)
  • One bond movie - it turned out to be kind of funny
The web interface is pretty decent and user friendly. The recommendations are good most of the times and the movies appearing in the "recommended" list are many-a-times watchable.

Overall, I liked this service very much and if you are keen on watching movies of your choice, this service is worth a try.

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