I like using the net to do things. It makes my life easy for the most part and I appreciate that. The sad fact however is that as of today the internet is a second or third or fourth or non existent part of a companies strategy. That this is the case with established brands is understandable(if short sighted). But new companies, even so called internet companies, have some terrible service standards. I dont want to pick on one particular company, but its a company that serves a need close to my heart, and I really hoped for more when I joined.

Seventymm is an online video rental company. Modeled after Netflix, for a monthly charge, you can get either 4 DVD’s a month or an unlimited number of DVDs a month. There are no late fees, when your done, ask them to collect what you have at home, and they’ll send you the next movies in your queue. The queue can be setup on their website.

Though I love the concept( I remember one year when I ran through a 500 movie rental subscription, I rented maybe a 100 movies, but lost 400 in late charges)

This weekend I got the movie Heyy Babyy but the DVD was defective. That happens sometimes, not much anyone can do about it and I dont blame seventymm at all for that. The problem is what happened afterwards. One gets 2 movies at a time, and i hadnt seen the other movie(The Fifth Element if your interested) that was sent. But seventymm policy is that they wont send just one movie, even to replace a defective disc. This strikes me as foolish.

Another problem I had, was I tried to watch Lost. They sent me the first 2 dvd’s no problem I asked for a pickup. They sent me Lost DVD5 and some other random dvd. I called, but once again nothing can be done. Seems like it should be a simple enough fix.

Its annoying when a service that really has potential craps out on issues like these. They should have better processes in place to handle it.

I wish there were some more features on their website, though with the recent changes its become tolerable, a couple of months ago it was unusable.

All in all a pretty good service with some service issues they need to get under control. Especially this one movie at a time thing.

Via India Uncut

Amt Verma’s excellent India Uncut blog pointed to the Times of India’s “Leader” Article. I have never been a big fan of the Times of India, neither the news(which I generally get from 100s of sources all over the net) or the op-ed(I like Hindustan Times and Indian Express a lot more).

Gautam Adhikari talks a great game though. Key Quote:

Strangely, in an age when you might presume it’s improbable in a modern democracy, it’s actually difficult to belong to our bandwidth in the Indian political spectrum. It isn’t only because the extremes of a fiercely Hindu nationalist right and an obtusely Neanderthal left, with the Congress party being a muddle in the middle, leave little space for reasoned debate along classically liberal lines.
In fact, a party professing market-oriented liberalism can even be termed unconstitutional. As we have argued in an editorial next to this article, you cannot under the Constitution register a party that debunks socialism or, for that matter, secularism.

 

That second paragraph is astounding. Unconstitutional. IIRC someones been making the effort to get this law changed through the courts, same way Naveen Jindal helped get us the right fly our own flag.

I thought the book was banned in India, but today got it on the road. Interesting, how I got a pirated copy of a banned book.

Update: Saw a post by Govindraj Ethiraj, on a similar subject