Anil Ambani’s Reliance entertainment limited(REL) has launched a new online video on demand service called bigflicks.com. Bigflicks.com claims that they are offering 1000 titles in languages including Hindi, Kannada, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu and Punjabi. Selected movies are available for free viewing and all movies are available for download after purchase and the pricing ranges from $4.49 (~= Rs. 200) to $19.99 (~= Rs. 800). Movie rental option is also available by which you can download the movies for a much lower price but the playback validity will exists only for 72 hours. No mentioning about the rental charges is available on the site.

Starting from the soon-to-be-released movie ‘Fear’(Hindi) to big hits like ‘Rang De Basanti’ (Hindi) , ‘Nuvvostanante Nenoddantana’ (Telugu) to oldies like ‘Graha Lakshmi’(Telugu, 1967) are available online. Salman khan’s latest film ‘Marigold‘ is in the coming soon section. Apart from Hindi and Telugu movies, i couldn’t see movies of any languages including Tamil as they claimed. Also i am not sure whether the running site has 1000 titles now. I am really surprised when seeing the disclaimer under some movies claimed that they are available for download all the over world except India. I have no clue on how they are going to protect copyright issues which may arise as downloading through proxy sites are not a big deal. Bigflicks team is planning to include advertisements in between the free online streaming movies which will be a good source of revenue.

REL also plans to enter offline DVD/VCD business by opening retail stores all over the country under the same brand, BigFlicks. To start with they will open their outlets in Hydrabad, Chandigar and Pune. REL plans to increase its outlet count by 100 before the end of this fiscal year and 500 in the next three years. The company is planning to invest 100 million dollars both for the offline and online DVD/VCD business and of which 75% goes to the offline market. I strongly believe that in the long run they will integrate both the entities like providing the facility of purchasing/renting DVD’s from the outlets via online etc.

I would rate the launched site, BigFlicks.com, as very much average as for as user experience is considered. They tried to integrate web 2.0 features like user interaction by reviewing the movies, rating a movie, maintaining ‘My downloads’ section, adding movies to wish list etc. But the navigation across various pages is not so much easy and search options are really poor which will have a great impact in finding a movie when more titles are added. Most importantly the pricing of DVD’s says that they are not definitely targeting Indian audiences but they are primarily targeting NRI’s and Indian movie lovers abroad. Even the video streaming currently uses windows media format (in the flv format era ) which is not suitable for Indian broadband situation.

DVD market in India which is currently dominated by unorganized video libraries is slowly converted to a organized sector after the entry of Moserbaer, SeventyMM, MovieMart etc. Reliance with its excellent establishing network all over the country can capture a big share of it. Bigflicks.com is its first step.

Bottomline: Interesting online service but the pricing and the streaming options will not fit for Indian audiences.