New service offers Bollywood over broadband
In a move both interesting, yet somewhat ill-conceived, Two British entrepreneurs have launched the first broadband service to offer Bollywood films to subscribers over the internet, Bollywood.tv. The endeavor is the first of its kind, allowing subscribers (10 pounds/month) to download and watch full-length Bollywood features.
According to co-owner of the site Nigel Regan, “The quality of the movies is superb, and you would never know you were not watching a DVD. Without any doubt at all, this makes Bollywood more accessible than ever before.”
The service may have appeal to those fans who love Indian cinema, but do not have access to Bollywood rental stores. The down side? Only 65 titles. So, for almost twice what you would pay for a Netflix account (50,000 titles), you can sign up get less than 100 movies. The site will be adding more titles in the future, hundreds according to this article, but really, couldn’t you just download and watch their entire library in a few months? After that, there’s not much reason to stay on. Plus, even if you are a hardcore Bollywood fan, you probably won’t be interested in watching every last one of the movies offered on the site.
Bottom line, if they increase their library by a factor of about 10, it might start to make sense. Bollywood produces more films than any other place on Earth, so it shouldn’t be that hard, right?
October 17th, 2005 at 11:14 am
Further to this piece on Bollywood.tv where you suggest it might be interesting if they multiplied their content by 10, I can confirm that they company have secured the internet rights to 730 films (even more than ten times) and will be adding these to the site over the coming weeks. This does, indeed, make it a very “interesting” site. Furthermore there’s no hanging around and waiting for films to download and no need to use up your computer’s memory saving them.