Game-For-Life?

Well, so, after 5 months of deliberation and wanting to have the time to watch movies at my own pace, I finally went ahead and signed on with Seventymm.com … Your own Indian Netflix. Yeah. And its working quite fine I tell you.

It all began when they ran a special promotion with Citibank for a credit card I hold with Citi, where they were waiving off certain deposits and registration charges if I registered with them just then. Since I did not have the time just then to be able to gorge on their movie collection, I let it be.

Come November end, and I finally got that long forsaken break I had been needing and looking forward to. And the first thing I did on the first day of my break, was to sign on for a DVD rental service. While the 70mm option was still open as the offer was going to last till December 31, 2007, I went around looking for the rest of the lot before taking a call!

So I went around looking on Google for companies that would be offering flicks on rental in Mumbai. Turned out there were quite a few players in the space. There is ClixFlix, Seventymm, MovieMart, CineSprite, Catchflix, FusionRental and Homeview and there are more of them. Plus how can you count out the local DVD shop, purely for the ease of access! Madhouse, which was another player touted to be big enough in the country, got bought out by Seventymm earlier this year.

So, turned out I was spoilt for choices. And I decided to compare 2 or 3 of the known names to make my pick. (I am a terribly brand conscious guy when it comes to the services space!)  So, I decided to pick between 70mm, ClixFlix (having sighted their shops somewhere earlier)  and Moviemart.

The best comparison for a layman comes at a website called India DVD Rental Guide. Another good, yet slightly dated comparison was to be found out at Startup Dunia[PDF]. I was, quiet simply, looking for a good large collection of movies, a good service standard in terms of turnaround time and something which would be value for money and uncomplicated in terms of rental plans. Being the movie buff I’ve become of late, I definitely had the capacity to consume a movie or 2 a day (especially till the I am on a break!)

And the more I crawled the Net, the more I got convinced of going with Seventymm. These guys kept it simple in terms of plans. There is a 4 discs a month plan for Rs. 199 and there is the unlimited discs plan for Rs. 549 per month. To top it up, you pre-pay for 5 months and you get the 6th free and if you pay for 10 months free, you get 2 free. Here are the plans for your reference:

I chose to go with them on the Unlimited plan for 6 months, costing me a cool Rs. 2745/-. That would get me 2 movies a day for 180 days, coming to a per night cost of Rs. 15 for 2 DVDs, far cheaper than the 100 bucks that the local DVD guys charge you every night. And with a little bit of sweet talk on the phone, I got them to stuff in another 2 months for free. That made it about 10 bucks per day, almost the price I remember paying for Videotapes like 10 years ago! Competition and Free market really works. With one eye on Big Flicks, the Reliance ADA Group’s DVD Rental venture coming out in the Mumbai market, Seventymm might already be looking to sweeten the deal for customers. Click here to have a look at Big Flicks’ plans. Reliance, as always, is already crashing the prices. Unfortunately, they are not available in Mumbai, just yet! They are also trying/have tried (not sure if this is an aborted attempt!) to acquire Seventymm, according to Mint.

Since I chose to use my old account to sign up, there were some “pending bills” that were being shown again and again to pay up. After a few phone calls between customer support and yours truly, the account was scrapped and a new one created so that I could pay up and start using their services. Now, there was a payment gateway goof-up which ended up debiting my account twice and crediting theirs only once. However, a few phone calls, some hard-talk and strong emails later, the erroneous charges were reversed.

Customer Service has been largely prompt, but sometimes fails totally! Like, the day I wanted to sign up, I was getting a call every 10 minutes till the time the payment was received. They did manage to sign me on this time. I logged on to the site to create a queue of the various movies I wanted to hire. I usually use the phone as well as the Internet to order movies, queue them up and request pickups. The way it works is, I receive 2 movies at a time, and they try and match the highest priorities on my movie queue! The guy comes in at around 2pm every-time and collects the old DVDs and gives me the new ones. What I don’t like is the inability to move out one unit at a point of time. So, if I have watched one movie and I want to replace it, I’d have to wait till the other one is viewed too, and goes back to them. Here is where Reliance will score better brownie points with the customers, since they will offer one movie replacement also. 

Somehow, I have, till date, not received movies at the top of my movie queue. These are latest  hindi blockbusters, and of course, everyone might want to watch them. Big Flicks and some other players have enforced a 48 hour return policy on new movies. Seventymm has not. Which means I don’t get a copy of Bhool Bhulaiya till all the 5-7-10 people who got the initial copies have not grown tired of watching ’em and they come around to me!

Also, their customer-service staff does not seem to be well trained in systems and processes totally. And talking systems and processes, I appreciate they would be setting them in place as and when they face some specific issues. The staff relapses into Hindi and switch between English and Hindi according to their convenience many a times while on the call with you. Like when the payments needed to be reversed, I was told they would try and get it done within 24 hours, but when 96 hours later nothing had happened and I called them back to check on payments, the guy responsible just refused to come on the line.

Not just that, one fine day not long ago, I receive 2 DVDs which were region locked and did not play on my DVD player. The bloke on the other side of the phone line asked me for my DVD players make and model, and promptly handed me over the Samsung toll-free helpline number saying they’d help you with the problem. I tell him, hey, the problem is with the discs as I don’t have to receive region-locked DVDs, but he just would not understand! People, buck up, else get aside! Here is a set of goof-ups narrated by an ol’time customer of theirs on Dance With Shadows Extra.

The one thing I would like 70mm to emulate is to get into the kiosk distribution model also. There is a movie rental service called Easy Entertainment which recently installed Kiosks called the Movie Bank at CR2, Nariman Point, Peddar Road, Juhu to start with in Mumbai. I can go anytime and pick a flick.  I suggested the same to the Head of Mumbai for 70mm and he said though he won’t comment on this particular service, they are in the process of evaluating more distribution options for the customers.

For all said and done, they have largely been smooth and nice to me and there is not much to complain for. They also seem to have a nice and experienced Management Team at the helm. They got a co-founder of Netflix on board as a director, what else would you want? And the media largely says nice things about them. Read this nice GigaOM entry about them: Seventymm, India’s Netflix? Though there are detractors also, like this gentleman at Tekchakra who thinks the Seventymm model will not work in India. Hell yeah, it works for me at least. And they have a nice commercial  too. So, time to go back to the movies for me, and you too! 

I recently came across a website called freerice.com, which to me occurs to be a nice concept. Here is the educated world, getting participative in Web 2.0, and there is the other side of the digital divide, which gets staples if you and me knew our vocabulary right.

Freerice.com donates 20 grains of rice free to the United Nations World Food Program everytime you come around and play their vocabulary game. The game is simple enough: it presents a word in English and a list of four potential synonyms. Choose correctly, and twenty grains of rice appear in a wooden bowl. And the game really has its grip on you, all for some persuasive technology. In the insights from the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab, Adam Tolnay writes, “The persuasive elements that make Free Rice so potent are the simplicity of the message (highlighted by visuals that graphically sow the grains of rice to be donated in a stylized bowl), the ease of use of the site (ie simple multiple choice questions one after another), the transparency of the transaction (you play, you learn, advertisers on site donate, hungry people get rice). Yet above all else I believe the persuasive technique that drives the success of Free Rice is the link of micro action (playing a game) to a macro cause (world hunger) via incremental steps (words for grains of rice). “. You can read the full article here

Its a win win situation for everyone: You get the game, FreeRice the traffic, the advertiser the visibility, and eventually, the needy the free rice. The power is in your hands, plain and simple!

But there are people who have contrarian views on the subject, and who think that John Breen, the man who created and runs the website, is making money off it. Here is an interesting post by PC Spy stating “Is Freerice.com making $150k in profits everyday?” And then here is an interesting counter arguement on Reditt which goes into many people doing the math trying to see if the site ever actually made any money or not! Essentially the main grouse is, that why is Freerice not a registered charity? And we still don’t have answers to those questions. Another very insighful read from the Stanford Daily asks you to pay heed to where the rice goes (via the UFP), clarifies for you that its not just rice but a full meal that they go on to provide. And that the largest recipient of rice is Burma. And why Burma, it asks? “The lack of an educated workforce skilled in modern technology contributes to the growing problems of the Burmese economy.” That is one possible reason! So essentially, the main problem is elsewhere, they say. You got to attack the problem at its root and get people to be educated, not just well fed! The article is hosted at the Standford Daily website.

Charity registered or not, larger issues addressed or not, the site gained enough traction last month to feed 50,000 people, which is a good thing to get to in about 8 weeks flat (the site went up on Oct 7, 2007!) So, I leave the call on you. If you like the idea, spread the word around. For any questions you might have, head to their FAQ page.