Reliance rebranded BigFlicks to BigFlix in Q2 of 2008 and pumped in close to Rs. 25 
crores for advertising.
BigFlix.com earns ~80 per cent of its revenue from rental services, while video-on-demand contributes 20% of the revenue.
The service is present in 10 cities, with a subscriber base of 80,000 and will be integrated with Reliance’s DTH service, BigTV (hopefully that will give a boost in user base).
As far as investments are concerned, company plans to invest $100mn in 4 years (~500 crores) and is seeing a break-even timeframe by Q3 2009.
DVD Rental Industry: What are others upto?
- Seventymm raised $12mn from NEA-IUV, has 70,000 customers and is aiming a revenue of Rs. 1500 Crores by 2013.
- MovieMart is targeting one million subscriber base in the next five years and is planning enter into other verticals like movie downloads on the website, DTH, television software and movie production.
The movie rental/DVD sales business is seeing lot of creative ideas – like Moser Baer is distributing DVDs on cart, but deep-pocketed players like BigFlix are playing on price point.
What’s interesting to note is that online distribution isn’t the most optimum mechanism and players are resorting back to the offline ways of doing business.
What’s your opinion on DVD rental business? Have you used BigFlix’s service? Any feedback?
Seems like promise of the future.
After investing all this money, How would they break-even with a user base of 80k (or even 4x of that by Q3’09)?
Im humming a Fleetwood Mac song while im writing this – ‘tell me lies, tell me sweet little lies’
(i dont mean you Ashish, hehe)
Bigflix service is far better than its competetiors at a low price. I am pretty sure all the customer numbers are marketing gimmics, no fact all big lies and interestingly VC’s are readily pumping moolahs. These comps must be fantasizing for break even,no way with such heavy investments.
Alright. BigFlix service in Delhi absolutely Sucks. I don’t know who designed/coded their website, but that also absolutely sucks in terms of ease of use and just working correctly !! Can u imagine movies getting removed from your queue automatically, without u even getting the disc ? Thats cos some unscrupulous employees showed that disc as delivered and returned on the same day just to free up that movie !! I mean, c’mon… How stupid do u think the customer is ?
Then there is a big flaw in their distribution system. They have a nodal center in naraina from where they service West Delhi(where I live), and even the nodal center doesn’t have the disc, you don’t get it. I mean, there are 3 other BigFlix stores that have that disc, why not just route it through them ? But no, thats company policy and rules. Bad SCM i say.
Last, but not the least, I fail to understand how they select movies from the queue. I mean, logically the movie at the top should be selected, right ! But no. BigFlix gets you the movie that is available, be it the one u wanted to watch this week or next month. The priority feature in their queue it seems is just for frills. Why not have a live status of disc availability so that users know whether that movie is available on that day or not ? Saves so much time and hassle… I personally have sent the delivery guy back to get me another movie just because they sent a movie that was way way down on my queue, and definitely not the genre I was in the mood to see.
There customer service is also very erratic. I finally had to dig the manager’s number of the nodal center so that I could get the proper discs for once! The customer rep. is just another call center trained employee who knows shit about how to actually solve the customer’s problem.
Most of these Indian Dvd rental services suck big time and they claim to be the netflix of India.keep dreaming
The BigFlix (earlier Bigflicks) service not only is extremely poor in terms of quality and usability but also awful with respect to customer service.
As a Hyderabad customer (and amongst the first few), I discovered that most of the movies that you actually want to watch (you know, the kind which you missed in the theatre or whose disc was released couple of months back)are scratched and of extremely poor quality. The service personnel were quite decent overall but they had no choice but to tell me to choose another movie as they didn’t have a non-scratched disc.
Their supply-chain is interesting. They have asked former Rental stores to come into their hold fully and give up all their discs and operations to them. These form the chain of stores that you can see along the road at many places. But the discs which you have queued come to you not from your closest store or any other store. They come from a central warehouse sort of location. So you might have queued a no-so-easily-available movie and they will tell you it is not available only for you to walk into your neighbourhood store and see it right there! And the neighbourhood guys aren’t allowed to deliver the discs in their store. The discs in their store is meant only for customers to walk in and pick up. I had many experieences of delayed delivery, abysmal disc quality and overall bitterness.
I cancelled my subscription upon which I was diligently pursued by their sales team. When I told them about all these issues in their system, they setup a conference call with the head of the Hyd operations, apparently, and asked me to voice them. I was promised immediate response but its been 10 months and I’m still waiting for that!
Bottomline: Its a reliance venture. Delivers mediocrity in a large scale.
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I also agree with Sudharshan and Shivaas. Movies getting removed from the queue automatically. Not being able to ship the movie of our priority. Discs with scratches/absolutely not usable. It’s better to watch movies on TV rather renting it from BigFlix.
I am currently using MovieMart service and I am very satisfied.They do not have queue system,you can select your own movie and you know exactly what you are getting.The quality of DVds are very good and rarely I get any bad print.Customer service is excelant.