The Hindu : National : Online DVD movie rental catches up

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Sunday, Sep 17, 2006
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National

Online DVD movie rental catches up

Anand Parthasarathy

Delhi is the second city to get the service

MOVIE OPTION: DVD rentals via the Internet has come to Bangalore and the national Capital.

Bangalore: Online DVD movie rental - a popular way abroad to see films at home - has come to India. After Bangalore, Delhi is the city whose residents can borrow Indian and international feature films on DVD by making their selection from a website.

The titles will be delivered by hand, the next day - and collected after one has finished viewing them.

The service was pioneered in Bangalore, a few weeks ago, by www.seventymm.com, an entertainment portal that offers selections from a library of over 10,000 titles.

After a Rs. 2,000 deposit and a Rs. 499 registration fee, Rs. 199 a month gives you 4 titles a month; Rs. 599 provides unlimited access.

You can borrow the DVDs as long as you like. Another Bangalore-based service is www.catchflix.com, where the rate is Rs. 99 for the loan of each DVD.

Seventymm has just launched a similar service in the national capital and hopes to cover other metros as soon as it can set up the local distribution logistics.

The home video segment is estimated to represent less than a tenth of India's Rs. 7,000 crore film industry revenues.

But major Hollywood studios now earn more from the sale of DVDs than from the theatrical releases of all except the biggest box office successes — and global trends are expected to move in this direction.

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