Muvi.com is IMDB Meets RottenTomatoes for Indian Movies

A multi-billion dollar market, over 1200 full length films produced annually, and a massive, vociferous audience in the world’s second fastest growing economy. That is the Indian film industry in a nutshell: a slew of languages, dialects, colors, genres and narratives, all growing at the breakneck speed of almost 4 movies per day!

Muvi.com wants to be the most comprehensive database for the dozens of movies that are released across the length and breadth of the country every week. And it wants to go beyond that as well, by offering reviews and social networking features. We take an in-depth look.

Being First

For decades, the Indian film industry was, as with much of India, a family run business.

Actors were picked from within the fold, and the only skillset required to be a director was the ability to say, “Action!” out loud (and of course, a famous last name).

Now, the industry is finally taking a few bold steps out of the cloister. NYU and UCLA Film School graduates are filling the ranks of directors, satiating a huge talent gap, and corporate investment has brought in some much needed professionalism in management. As many as 30 film production companies have been listed on the National Stock Exchange – something unimaginable two decades back.

But there’s one realm where the industry has still stuck to its archaic ways: the internet.

For an industry that produces 1200 movies annually, you’d think building a complete, comprehensive online database would be top priority. Unfortunately, it hasn’t been so, and that is exactly where startups like Muvi.com step in.

Muvi.com is the first and the largest database of movies released in India. It’s not comprehensive by any means yet (something the founders are working hard on), but for a new site, its archives run quite deep. But at the same time, it’s much more than a mere IMDB clone: it is also a review aggregator (a la Rotten Tomatoes), with elements of Facebook thrown in for good measure.

More Than Just a Database

Any Indian movie buff will tell you about the desperate need for an IMDB clone, albeit one devoted entirely to Indian movies. But what is needed even more desperately, perhaps, is a consolidation of the movie review space.

Simply put: we do not have our Roger Eberts and Richard Roepers; the objectivity of movie reviews in publications large and small is often under scrutiny. There’s an implicit trust deficit in ‘professional’ movie reviews, which, by the way, can swing the fate of your (expensive) evening out at the theater.

Aggregated movie reviews by critics

Muvi.com’s review aggregation presents a much more objective analysis of a movie. Rather than relying on a handful of “professional” reviewers, the site collates reviews from critics and users alike, spewing out a percentage approval rating. You’ve already seen it in action in RottenTomatoes, but Muvi.com tries something different (and better) through its proprietary ‘Social Relevance’ technology that farms reviews on Twitter and Facebook, weighs in their sentiment and incorporates it into the ‘muviemeter’ aggregate score. It works quite well in its current avatar, but in the future, perhaps higher preference could be given to my followers and friends when calculating this score.

RA.One's buzzmeter runs low, thanks to poor critic response

The same methodology is also used to calculate a celebrity’s popularity index. So this week, in light of the poor response to RA.One, Shah-Rukh Khan has a lower popularity index than Himesh Reshammiya. It’s provides a useful insight into popularity trends that ought to be of interest to marketers (and to settle popularity debates).

Social Networking, Built-In

If you are launching a startup in 2011, it would be criminal to not include some social features.

Muvi.com goes the whole hog by integrating an extensive set of social features. Once you create your profile, others can follow you around the site, check out your liked (as well as disliked) movies, and read your reviews. Founder and serial entrepreneur Anshuman Das considers it to be the site’s USP that differs it from Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB. While it is definitely not a full-featured social networking suite, it gets the job done quite adequately and should help spread buzz about the site.

Muvi.com's Social Networking Suite

Competition, and the Future Vision

As far as competition is concerned: there is none, save IMDB and Facebook themselves, neither of which are India centric.

Picking a leaf from RottenTomatoes extensive book of tricks, Muvi.com will, in the near future, offer a host of editorial content as well. Think: galleries, best-of lists, etc. with the data culled from the aggregated reviews. This should attract a larger audience to the fledgling site.

Also on the cards are partnerships with major publications to offer the muviemeter widget, along with deals to offer DVDs and movie rentals. This should present additional revenue streams, besides advertising (the site currently runs no ads).

Going forward, I can see Muvi.com becoming an automatic choice to find Indian movie reviews, but if the site is to win over a larger audience (it aims to be among India’s top 200 websites), it needs to offer a more detailed and in-depth database of virtually every Indian movie ever released, and also expand its content offerings. At the same time, tt would be a massive disservice to label the site as a RottenTomatoes clone; not only does it fill a void, but also expands on its conceptual parents’ original offerings.

Muvi.com is founded by serial entrepreneurs Anshuman Das and Sanjib Parida. The site is currently self-funded and has 7 employees.