Being a movie freak, I have tried to source movies through various ways – borrowing from friends, renting from the local DVD library and buying CDs/DVDs when I can. Most of these are limiting experiences, if you really care about the picture/audio quality and want total flexibility of watching movies at your own leisure.
One fine day, I stumbled upon BigFlix and their 14 days free trial offer sounded very tempting. I decided to give it a shot.
The online sign up at rental.bigflix.com is extremely simple. Once signed up you can browse/search for movies, TV shows, documentaries of your interest and make a queue. Within no time I had about 50 titles queue. There is reasonably huge collection of English movies, then most Hindi hits and some Marathi too. You may have problems finding offbeat movies though. My suggestion is sign up for free, try searching for movies you like and make a queue. It will give you an idea whether you will get the desired bang for buck.
They have a pretty polished web based(+ SMS based) system to order door step delivery and pickup. The delivery typically takes about 15 to 20 hours after I order.(I stay about 10 kms away from their Pune warehouse) You get SMS and email notification about the delivery. By the way, the guy with DVD does not take any sort of appointment before dropping by. There does not seem any provision to, say, make him arrive only after 7 PM. So if you have nobody to receive the DVD at home, you have to visit the nearest BigFlix outlet yourself. Or alternatively get them at your work place.
The DVDs are all authentic, with their DVD boxes et all.(I am only renting English movies so far) I am subscribed for over a month now, and not ran into many scratched discs. They have all played well without hiccups on my LG DVD player. If you are to use computer, be prepared for CRC errors though as hundreds of people have handled the discs and they will not be 100% shiny new. Expect Hindi movie discs more scratched / overused than English. Check discs before accepting them if you can.
You can rate movies at the website. These ratings help to choose movies as well. Search facility is great. Queue management is good too. Everything on the site looks and works great.
Typically there is a rush for recent hits, so it works best if you are flexible about what you are going to watch today. It is not uncommon that I am in mood for a particular romantic comedy, but have to settle for some action flick instead.
I am not too happy about the service & support provided by courier folks delivering DVDs and BigFlix crew at the outlet. Most of them are like temporary workers having no urge to help the customer. The outlet folks ignore customers as much as they can(they are not monitored). It is better if you have to interact only with the other’face’ of the service - website and customer care.
Overall a good experience. They often have discount packages which will help you to get monthly unlimited disc plans as low as 250 per month+ no security deposit(I opted for discounted quarterly plan around December 2009). If you are going to watch multiple movies a week, BigFlix is economical, as the local DVD library typically takes 40 bucks per DVD. But if you are going to watch only 1 per week, I think you better stick to other sources. Subscription is cost effective for heavy users only. Secondly, do try the 14 day free plan first and if everything works well for you then decide about upgrading to paid service.