FILM fans around the world will be flocking to a website set up in Exeter if a city entrepreneur's venture proves successful.

Tim Isaac founded MovieMuser after being made redundant from his post as editor of city magazine DVD Monthly when it closed earlier this year.

He manages the site from The Senate in Southernhay Gardens and his home in Princesshay, and hopes its mix of cinema, DVD and Blu-ray news and reviews will eventually rival established sites like Empire.

When DVD Monthly, which was produced from offices on Marsh Barton, became a victim of the recession in February, the South West peninsula lost its only national film publication.

Tim, who had worked there for nine years, wanted to keep a strong national presence for film journalism in the region, and was confident that the area had all the expertise needed to create a specialist entertainment website with international appeal.

"The thing with Exeter and the South West in general is there's a lot of untapped talent in this area," he said. "Because there's no one else who does this, there's a lot of people and companies around that I can use. In London there's a lot more competition and it's a lot more difficult to find the people, and of course the overheads are so much higher.

"While the traditional thinking was you can't do this unless you are in London, with modern technology it's a lot easier and they can just send us the DVDs.

"We can send freelances to cinema screenings in London, so in many ways it's easier to run it down here, and it's nicer."

The website was built by North Devon firm Convallis Software, which is currently putting the finishing touches to a system that will allow anyone in the world to host their own film blog on the MovieMuser site. The website is hosted at a facility on Marsh Barton.

Most of MovieMuser.co.uk's content is created by Tim and other South West based journalists.

"The focus at the moment is on building up the amount of users and page views," he said. "Once we have got it up to hundreds of thousands of page views a month, we can go to film companies and ask for money to advertise."

The site received a boost less than a month after its launch at the end of May when one of its articles was featured on the homepage of the Internet Movie Database (IMDB), one of the world's top 50 websites.

This resulted in more than 14,500 film fans from around the globe visiting the site in less than 24 hours.

Tim said: "I've been told endlessly over the years that London is the only place in the UK that can produce successful entertainment journalism and that you'll never get readers in such a competitive area as film without a bottomless pit of start-up funding from a major media company.

"MovieMuser.co.uk getting featured on IMDB and attracting so many visitors so soon after its launch shows that not only can the South West produce top class film writing, but that Devon also has companies like Convallis that have the expertise to build versatile and technically advanced entertainment sites."