Sanjib Parida, Muvi, India’s first and largest movie database

Sanjib, please tell us what Muvi is all about.

Muvi is basically a movie database. It aggregates movie reviews from all leading critics, twitter(for public opinion) and Facebook(for movie reviews and interest of one’s friends and family). It also has a social layer that connects to your friends on social networks and show their likes and interest in the movies.

How is Muvi different from other movie database sites?

Most entertainment websites in India including bollywoodhungama.com and chakpak.com are movie gossip and news related websites. Muvi.com is about movie information, not gossip. It is also the first site that integrates social networking with movies. We have developed a proprietary ‘Social Relevance’ technology that shows movie reviews and celebrities listings from social networks such as Facebook and Twitter.

How did the idea for Muvi come about? How much capital was required to implement the idea?We realized that there was no place for us to find movie information such as new trailers or posters, information on old movies, list of upcoming movies of a star etc. Most current websites do not have a structured data for the movies. We lived in the US for several years where sites like IMDB, Flixster and Rottentomatoes offer this information. We got the idea of launching a similar website in India for the Indian market.

Tell us about your background.

We first started working together on a cloud computing consulting services startup. This idea came to us while working on the other company and then we jumped on to it.

Where do you see Muvi five years from now?

Indian movie industry is a $5 billion industry growing at 18% annually. We want to be the largest online entertainment platform in India in the next 2 years.

What is your revenue model?

We make our revenue from a number of sources. Firstly through Online ads, we also have a paid account for our customers to view advanced statistics, trends, analysis and engagement. There is also a paid API to access movie data. We also have on our website a promotional platform for movie production houses. The company is currently self-funded. We have funding to sustain the company for at least 1 year. We will seek outside investment before then.

How big is the team behind Muvi? Are you looking at hiring?Anshuman Das and I are the co founders of Muvi. We currently have 7 people in total – 3 developers, 1 graphics designer, 1 system administrator, 1 QA engineer and 1 marketing and business development professional. Yes, we are looking for engineers right now.

How has the journey been so far? Let us know about your expansion plans.

So far the journey has been good. Muvi.com is a Microsoft Bizspark startup. We launched our beta website only a couple weeks ago. We currently have around 200 unique visits per day and we got about 175 face book fans in just Seventeen Days. We also have talked to industry veterans and senior executives from large production houses and they have all expressed genuine interest in such an online platform

We at YourStory.in wish Sanjib and Muvi much success. To know more about this venture and their movie database, check out http://www.muvi.com/. Also, let us know your views on this story by writing to us at [email protected]