JOIN USMubi adds new movies every day
The New York Times recently reported that after quarantines were started all over the world, the use of Facebook and YouTube has increased drastically. Netflix and Amazon Prime recently decided to tone down their video quality in Europe to accommodate the increase in demand.
In case you are bored over the course of the two-and-a-half weeks that you are stuck at home and are looking to find something new to watch, you could explore ‘Mubi’. The chances are that you already know what it is because they have been bombarding people with advertisements on YouTube. Mubi is a streaming platform structurally different from Netflix and Prime. In that, you do not simply pick one from the hundred movies that show on their server.
Originally created for a global audience, at any given point, the platform shows 30 handpicked titles. Every day, a new film is added and every film gets taken out after 30 days. Mubi says that this style of working was chosen to save us the time of finding the best films out there; the platform will do the work for us.
But Mubi’s definition of good may not go down well with everyone. The platform is primarily designed for those who like festival films and classics. This writer used to subscribe to the platform a couple of years ago and found it partially satisfying. I enjoyed that Mubi streamed films that are otherwise difficult to find. Though a vast majority of the films screened were not down my alley, I always have two or three films I want to watch at any point. But if you prefer a largely genre-driven style that a platform like Netflix chooses, this platform may not be up your alley.
Mubi India was started recently and provides a more lucrative deal than the original set-up. It gives you all the films that are added in the Mubi World selection, in addition to a parallel movie section where you get a new Indian movie a day.
The Indian films so far chosen have largely been middle-of-the-road classics, which someone with a more mainstream palate can digest, but with a fair representation from the arthouse circuit.
Following the western model, the platform has chosen films by luminaries from India, some of whom are from the earliest decades of the country’s film industries (there were even films from V Shantaram at one point). A bulk of films by Basu Chatterjee, Hrishikesh Mukherjee and Raj Kumar have already been screened.
Mubi India is currently offering three months of streaming at Rs 199.