MUMBAI: BigFlix Movie Rentals, the online and offline movie rental service under Reliance Big Entertainment, plans to have a total of 150 stores by March 2011.

The plan will have BigFlix.com deliver films at home to the people residing in Tier II cities like Jaipur, Vadodara, Surat, Lucknow, Nasik, Jamshedpur, Kochi, Patna, Nagpur and Kanpur.

In its endeavour, the company will engage local logistic partners to deliver movies at home to the masses in the respective cities.

It has 10 franchise stores in Mumbai, Pune, Delhi, Chandigarh, Faridabad and Panipat. The stores will start functioning once they have their respective logistics partners finalised for these cities.

The rental company has a total retail presence of 60 stores and an access to about 21,000 titles in 13 Indian languages.

The company‘s franchise business will have two models, namely, ‘store‘ franchise and ‘master‘ franchise. While the store franchise will be where an interested party can become the franchise of a single store in any specific city, the master franchise will be where interested party can opt for the franchise of a set number of stores for a specific geographic location.

Speaking on the franchise plan, BigFlix.com chief lead- franchise operations Puneet Sachdeva 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 to 80 per cent of our registrations coming in from the offline route, and a constant response in terms of enquiries/ registrations on our website from these cities for our film service, we are confident that the franchise model will be the most feasible path at this stage," added Sachdeva.

Currently, BigFlix.com has a customer base of 80,000 customers and with the franchise foray, it aims to reach a target of 1, 50, 000 customers by March 2011.