I had written about the online DVD rental service Seventymm last year and how I came away rather disappointed. In the year since, they’ve been periodically contacting me about their latest offers. I always told them to call me back when they had a better offer, i.e, without a deposit, registration fee etc. They finally have a new offer now which costs Rs 995 for 6 months and 4 movies a month. I’ve signed up and have been using the service for a couple of months now. Expectedly, there are good and bad aspects to the service.

First the good -

1. The convenience – The USP of Seventymm and similar services is that the movies are delivered and picked up from your home, and they’ve completely lived up to this. I just have to add movies to my queue on their site and call them up whenever I want a pickup/delivery.
2. Customer service - Whenever I request a delivery somebody drops by at the promised time. They’ve been very punctual about this in the 3-4 times I’ve had movies delivered. They once mistakenly delivered a VCD of a movie when I had requested a DVD, and when I pointed out the mistake, offered an extra delivery without any additional charges. On a related note, I recommend that you always call them and not use the SMS or web modes of requesting a pickup/delivery. On the phone, you can specify what you want exactly and that prevents mistakes.
3. They provide multiple ways for you to reach them, and though I haven’t tried it, you can ask them to deliver movies to your home or office.
4. There have been no issues with the quality of the DVDs. I was initially apprehensive about unusable, scratched discs, but that hasn’t been a problem. Perhaps because they’re still a new service?
5. They’ve taken care of some of the no-brainer things I had mentioned in my previous post, like providing RSS feeds of latest movies added, better search and discovery etc.

Now the bad -

1. Reliability - This is a serious problem. Their site just throws up an ugly error page very often. It’s pretty much impossible to browse the site for titles for any decent amount of time without encountering a big “Runtime Error” page. Time to ditch ASP and use some proven technology?
2. Size of collection – Pretty good blockbuster movie coverage, but not many niche movies. I guess this will improve with time.
3. Broken rating system – As you’re browsing the site, every movie has a rating below the cover image denoting what I think is the average rating of the movie by other Seventymm users. The same interface allows you to specify your rating of the movie too which is displayed next to the average rating, and I think they use this information in their recommendation system. The big problem here is that I see many of those little numbers next to the average ratings of movies that I haven’t even watched. Surely some bug. I don’t know how good their recommendation system is, but this bug will surely be messing up all their data.
4. Usability – Never a strength of Indian websites, Seventymm doesn’t do too well here too. A simple example is the movie queue. How do you re-order the list to change your delivery priority? There’s a text box next to each movie with the current position in the queue. If you want to change the order, you have to manually change the number in all the textboxes to make it reflect your choice, which is a big pain if you have many movies in your queue. How difficult is it to provide a simple drag and drop interface when there are multiple Javascript libraries which make adding the feature very simple?

But, at the end of the day Seventymm is a useful service to me. It’s literally impossible to watch a movie in Bangalore on weekends unless you’ve planned it well in advance, and I’m finally catching up on all the movies I’ve missed!