Indian actor-producer Farhan Akhtar launches an app for Bollywood fans

Despite the popularity of Bollywood, it's surprising that India doesn't have its own version of a resourceful app like IMDb or Rotten Tomatoes yet.

Indian actor, producer and director Farhan Akhtar is hoping to change that with the launch of Flickbay, which claims to be Bollywood's first 'official' app for movie lovers.fl

Launched by Akhtar's production house Excel Entertainment, Flickbay is the second major Bollywood-centric app to be launched this year, since the release of actress Sonam Kapoor's celebrity app a few months ago. Flickbay hopes to be a movie database that includes new trailers, movie reviews, ratings, songs, real-time news, and box office numbers. . It will also have details of showtimes for movies in theatres and on TV. They also claim to have a page for every Bollywood movie, with ratings, trailers, box office collections and other information.

"Working in the movie space, I realised that there was no platform which combined everything about Bollywood under one roof," Flickbay founder Vishal Ramchandani told Mashable. "One had to go to individual websites, blogs etc. to get their daily dose of Bollywood content."

While several entertainment websites in India have apps, Flickbay hopes to stand out from its competitors with exclusive news coverage.

In the future, Flickbay plans to introduce a system of rewards for consuming content. Users can collect points for consuming and sharing content, which will be redeemable against movie tickets, autographed merchandise and film memorabilia. It also plans to integrate a social network to promote user-generated movie reviews and create personalised lists for favourite movies, songs and trailers. It also plans to use a Facebook-like algorithm to recommend content to users on the basis of their usage.

Flickbay is easy to use, but seems to be currently focused on recent and forthcoming films. A few searches for older movies reveal that its database is still a work in progress.The app still some way to go before being called comprehensive, but its launch indicates the huge potential for movie-centric apps in India.

Flickbay is available on Android and the iOS for free.

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