I came across an advertisement for moviemart in the newspaper and I decided to give it a shot. Before this, my only source of DVDs was the local video store that charged me 50 rupees per movie, and their selection of movies was as vast as Laloo Prasad Yadav’s english vocabulary.
Firstly, I was quite impressed by the website. It was easy to use and the whole system appealed to me. As far as I know, the US based site Netflix started this trend of online movie rentals. However, with Netflix, you received DVDs in the mail, and you needed to mail them back to Netflix. That was how it worked in the US. In India though, labour is cheap, and that’s where I think Moviemart scores over Netflix.
Moviemart works like this: You sign up for an account with them(you can pay online through credit card). Depending on the kind of account you have, you pay a monthly membership fee. You can opt for unlimited rentals(2, 3 or 4 DVDs at a time). You can make your own wishlist and then choose what DVD(s) you want to watch the next day. What makes them amazing is their speed. You could add a movie at 11 in the morning and you will most probably have it the same day. A moviemart guy will come and deliver it to your place. You can then go to the website again and request them to pick-up the movie and deliver another one, or another set of movies.
The selection is quite huge. One thing that I do wish for is a bigger selection of foreign movies, and independent movies. That’s where Netflix scores over moviemart(Netflix is not available to customers in India though). But still, the selection of movies at moviemart is good enough to keep you interested for a few years at least. Also, the rate at which they acquire new movies is pretty impressive.
All in all, I would certainly recommend moviemart to anyone interested in renting DVDs. It is a whole lot better than walking to the local video store and trying to decide what movie to rent, and sometimes coming back empty-handed because the movie you wanted to watch has been rented out to someone else.