BIGFlix Movie Rentals, India’s largest online and offline movie rental service (a division of Reliance BIG Entertainment), announced its retail expansion plans via the franchise route with a total of 150 stores by March 2011. BIGFlix.com will deliver movies at home to the people residing in Tier II cities which will include Jaipur, Vadodara, Surat, Lucknow, Nasik, Jamshedpur, Kochi, Patna, Nagpur, Kanpur and many more.

BIGFlix currently delivers movies to 9 cities with a total retail presence of 60 stores and an access to a wide range of 21000 titles across 13 Indian languages. BIGFlix.com will engage local logistic partners best suited to the respective cities’ dynamics to deliver movies at home to the masses. The BIGFlix franchise business will have two models, namely, Store franchise and Master franchise. Store franchise, is where the interested party can become the franchise of a single store in any specific city and Master franchise, is where the interested party can opt for the franchise of a set number of stores for a specific geographic location.

Speaking on the announcement of the franchise plans, Mr. Puneet Sachdeva, Chief Lead- Franchise Operations, BIGFlix.com, said, “We are all geared up with the launch of our new expansion plans with the franchise route. While we will focus on the brand building and content acquisition aspects meeting with the specific requirements of the denizens residing in these cities, our franchisees will handle all the logistics and operations of the business. Considering that even today we see 75 – 80 % of our registrations come from the offline route, and constant tremendous response in terms of enquiries / registrations on our website from these cities for our movie service, we are confident that franchise model will be the most feasible path at this stage. Currently we have a customer base of 80,000 customers and with the franchise foray we aim to reach a target of 1, 50, 000 customers by March 2011.