Bigflicks November 26, 2007
Posted by Pallav Sharda in : Movie Rental , add a commentIt was inevitable. Sooner or later, the big boys were going to enter the Indian online movie rental space. Reliance ADA-Group made its foray with Bigflicks this past August.
There are two parts to Bigflicks - media download and rental. Download cost between $4.49-$19.99 (worldwide; and yes, they are DRM‘ed and need a proprietary media manager to access downloaded content) and the rental service is currently in Chandigarh, Pune, Hyderabad, Bangalore only. Predictably enough, they are well placed content-wise: movies in most languages, TV series, plays and games. Even a handful of adult titles.
Even if you ignore the bad grammar (’How we work?’, ‘Ask your Query’) , the download site overall is unimpressive, specially given the deep pockets behind it. I hate the fact that it autmatically starts playing the trailers when you open it.
The rental section is okay to navigate, but the real deal there is going to be execution in the physical world. I’m sure the plans starting at Rs.250 are competitively priced, but it remains to be seen if it gets good response from the users.
Makaan November 14, 2007
Posted by Pallav Sharda in : Real Estate , 2commentsAnother real-estate site for Indians. Makaan is owned by People Interactive (India) Pvt Ltd, which owns several web portals like Fropper, Mauj, Astrolife and Shaadi.
Apart from the very relevant domain name, I’m not impressed one bit. It’s another run-of-the-mill property website, with a very mundane user interface. They have more content than the rest of crowd, but that probably has more to do with the big backing of People Group than actual user participation. Their business model is online advertising (surprise!), posting and searching is free for registered users.
This is probably the reason why traditional in-person Indian industries like real-estate wont be revolutionized by internet, yet. Connecting buyers and sellers is just one piece of the puzzle- the real value proposition is in simplifying the whole experience, which would mean taking part in the actual transaction in some way. Startups like Zillow and Redfin are doing this by providing price estimates, closing the deal etc. Of course to enable that, we’d need a industry body like NAR running a common repository like MLS in an impartial way. Till that happens, modernization of real-estate industry in India is just smoke and mirrors.
BestOfMalyalam November 9, 2007
Posted by Pallav Sharda in : Media Streaming , 11commentsYawn. Another day, another amateur Indian media streaming website. BestOfMalyalam was suggested by a eIndia reader, and I thought I might as well add them to the list.
They offer packaged channels related to malayalam content, for a monthly subscription fee. In fact, they claim “We are the sole authorized distributors of Asianet channels over the web”. Wonder why then they don’t have a mention or ad on the official Asianet website. Anyways, I’ll refrain from any judgment since I’ve not tried them personally (I’m not their target audience either).