By the time Anshuman Das reconsidered the office, the building was almost finished. Muvi, the streaming software company he founded, was staying remote. A headquarters intended for his own team had acquired an awkward question: who, exactly, was going to sit in it?
His answer was to make part of it available to other businesses. Muvi Spaces emerged from that change of plan in Bhubaneswar. Das still used the building himself. The company could remain distributed; the founder could keep going to an office. Apparently, both arrangements could survive without requiring everyone else to choose sides.
There is something appealing about a business story that begins with an expensive object refusing to follow the business plan. Buildings have a rather literal way of making an argument. They occupy land. They need occupants. A strategy presentation can be quietly revised; several floors of glass tend to demand a more practical response.
For Das, the episode offers a useful way into a career spent working on the arrangements behind other people’s work. Streaming platforms need infrastructure. Teams need ways to collaborate. A half-empty office needs a second purpose. The interesting question is what happens when the original arrangement stops being useful.
Before the play button
Muvi’s earlier life was closer to the movies themselves. In June 2011, cofounder Sanjib Parida described a movie database and social platform, naming Das as his fellow cofounder. The small team was exploring advertising, paid access to analytics, a movie-data API and promotional services for production houses. The beta site had only recently launched.
That early picture matters because it gives Muvi a history before its familiar streaming proposition. Its relationship with entertainment began with information, discovery and the business surrounding films. The company’s later role would place it farther behind the screen, supplying technology to businesses that wanted their own services.
Das had already founded two businesses and sold one before Muvi. His education combined computer science and marketing. Those disciplines meet rather conveniently in streaming: one asks whether a system works; the other asks whether anyone has a reason to pay for it.
By 2015, he was describing an audience that expected to move among computers, televisions and handheld devices. Internet access and smartphones were changing the possible audience for on-demand video in India. The opportunity came with a technical nuisance: viewers could change screens much more casually than a business could build for all of them.
and social platform
for content owners
made public
story published
A business behind somebody else’s name
Das’s argument for Muvi was also an argument about independence. In 2015, he pointed to content businesses depending on large platforms for distribution and advertising income. Muvi Studio offered another route: build a streaming service carrying the content owner’s own brand, with the underlying technical work supplied as a service.
The distinction changes the founder’s job. A company selling entertainment has to persuade viewers to watch. A company supplying streaming infrastructure has to help another business deliver, manage and earn money from what those viewers watch. Its work includes the unglamorous machinery that makes a polished screen possible.
This is where Das’s public interests become unusually practical. He writes about pricing, advertising and content discovery. The questions are small enough to be answered and large enough to matter: what should a viewer pay, which model fits a particular catalogue, and why would someone return?
In his March 2020 discussion of pricing, he connected subscriptions to substantial, regularly refreshed libraries and pay-per-view to smaller or more specialised catalogues. He also considered advertising and optional extras. The advice was conditional. A streaming service needed to understand its audience and inventory before choosing a way to charge.
His September 2020 writing on advertising made a related point about relevance. A discount means little when the offer has no connection to what a customer wants. For a technologist, it is an instructively ordinary observation. A functioning delivery system cannot rescue an unwanted proposition. The customer still gets a vote, usually exercised with remarkable speed.
Seven customers is a crowded room
The early operating story becomes more human in the recollections of the people Das hired. Manas Mohapatra joined in June 2016 as a technical writer after an interview with the CEO. He remembered a company of 26 employees and seven customers. Six months later, the customer count had reached 20.
Those numbers belong to that period, rather than to Muvi today. Their interest is in the scale of the experience. At seven customers, each addition is easy to notice. A business can celebrate growth without requiring a chart whose axis begins in the millions. Everyone knows what the extra work means.
Mohapatra’s own responsibilities expanded. He became a training lead in 2017, continued writing and training, and took on video work with encouragement from Das. His account describes a founder involved in the development of an employee’s role, close enough to notice that a technical writer might also become useful in front of a camera.
Software engineer Sunil Kund remembered an even smaller Muvi when he joined in 2015. He also recalled a harder moment: Sony, an important customer, left to build its own platform. Kund described the team continuing to improve the product’s quality, security and performance. The customer’s departure sits alongside the growth stories, giving the picture some necessary friction.
For an infrastructure company, customer independence has an uncomfortable edge. The aim is to make another business more capable. Sometimes that business eventually chooses to do more itself. Kund’s recollection makes the trade-off visible without turning it into a tidy lesson. A departure creates work. Someone has to decide which part of the product to improve next.
The company manual leaves the company
In May 2022, Das took a different kind of internal work public. Muvi released the culture document he had written, allowing other companies to use and adapt it. Alongside broad principles, it included practical templates for workplace communication. Here was a CEO publishing instructions for the everyday business of being colleagues.
A culture document is an easy object to underestimate. It has none of the glamour of a product launch. Yet it deals with the questions that determine how much useful work a team can do: how information travels, how people approach one another, and whether an unfamiliar idea can reach someone able to act on it.
Das explained his intention in a public post. He wanted less dependence on hierarchy and more freedom for ideas and careers to move across the organisation. He also wanted other employers to adapt the approach. Publishing the document made that ambition inspectable. Readers could consider the actual wording and borrow what suited them.
The distinction between a principle and a lived experience appears in Akshay Salunke’s recollections. A former business development manager, he described being able to approach Das with basic work questions. He remembered the CEO as modest and accessible. For someone learning to sell software, permission to ask a simple question could be more immediately useful than an elaborate statement of values.
His experience is one person’s account, with the ordinary limits that implies. Still, it supplies a concrete test of the founder’s stated intentions. An open organisation has to be usable by the person who knows least about a particular subject. Otherwise, openness becomes another office amenity that looks excellent during the tour.
“the imagination of the talent that we hire and nurture.”
Anshuman Das · on what should fuel his products
A television habit worth keeping
Das’s thinking about streaming has room for familiar habits, too. In March 2021, he wrote about free ad-supported streaming television, known as FAST. Scheduled channels could give older programmes and existing libraries another distribution route. Viewers could encounter a linear television experience through connected devices.
That interest complicates the usual story in which every new technology requires the disappearance of an old habit. Choosing a title from a catalogue and dropping into a scheduled channel serve different moods. There is room in a household for deliberate selection and the pleasant surrender of letting a programme already in progress make the decision.
For a content owner, the question becomes how to arrange material it may already possess. Das considered creating channels from existing libraries, including short videos. It is another example of his attention to configuration: the same underlying assets can support different experiences when the delivery and commercial model change.
In November 2022, Muvi Live won the Live Streaming Service category in the Streaming Media Readers’ Choice Awards. The recognition belonged to the product and the team behind it. It also provided a public milestone for a founder whose work usually appears beneath a customer’s branding. Infrastructure occasionally gets its own round of applause.
An idea needs somewhere to land
The office brings the story back to a smaller scale. Das likes whiteboards. At Muvi Spaces, he wanted the desk partitions to serve as writing surfaces. His account of the design describes a preference for putting thoughts somewhere visible, within reach of the person having them.
It is a pleasing detail for someone who runs a software company. The next useful idea might still begin with a marker. There is no subscription to renew, though somebody will eventually have to find the eraser.
The culture document and the office invite a similar reading. Both concern the circumstances in which work happens. One provides language that other employers can adapt; the other offers a place other businesses can occupy. In each case, something first developed for Muvi becomes available beyond it.
Das’s public ambitions also extend to the Muvi Foundation, whose stated commitment allocates 10 percent of the company’s annual profits to social welfare. Its work includes education, livelihoods and environmental initiatives. The commitment expresses an intended relationship between the business and its surrounding community; it should be read as that commitment rather than a calculation of money already distributed.
There is no need to make the office into a monument. Its interest lies in its change of use. A founder commissioned a workplace, recognised that his team’s habits had moved elsewhere, and opened space for other people. The building could keep its original care and acquire a different audience. For someone who helps businesses put their own names on a screen, making room for another name on the door seems a reasonable continuation.