With over 1,000 films, many available to rent free for a five-day period (during the test phase) or to purchase for $4.99 a pop, Jaman's catalogue is impressive for a start-up. Titles include everything from Shaw Brothers martial arts classics such as The Legend Of The Fox, The Sentimental Swordsman, and The Lady Hermit to recent celebrated Bollywood melodramas Black and Chokher Bali to film festival favorites Villa Paranoia (Denmark) and Garden of the Frontier (Slovenia). The site also houses a large collection of American films, from George Hickenlooper's "Some Folks Call It A Slingblade" (later remade into the celebrated feature) and recent indie docs such as Inside Iraq: The Untold Stories and Awful Normal.

"Less than one percent of films made in the world find distribution in the United States, leaving thousands of great stories untold," said Jaman.com CEO and Informatica co-founder Gaurav Dhillon in a statement yesterday.

The San Francisco-based company recently announced a partnership with the San Francisco International Film Festival, which celebrates its 50th edition this April, to offer online screenings of a select group of feature films.


Though some consumers might resist downloading an entirely new player for Jaman's movies, a test drive of the service was smooth and the player ran surprisingly bug-free. But no one, not even the tech masterminds of the Bay area, can speed up the download process for a feature-length film. While the site uses a global peer-to-peer network called Cascade to distribute its movies, it took a full afternoon to download the Hindi emotional epic Black. But the results nearly lived up to Jaman's claims of "better-than-DVD quality."

If you've never seen a sweeping Bollywood melodrama or a crazy Hong Kong karate flick, now's your chance. As Jaman's slogan states: "Join the world."