Getting inside Movie Fan's heads

January 30, 2005 5:37 PM

"Unsatisfactory movie viewing can only be attributed to human error." The Denver Post examines the way technology can help viewers find their next favorite movie.
posted by bonzo (17 comments total)

"It's scary," said Riedl, whose research group has proven that people can be manipulated into renting certain movies by showing them bogus approval ratings generated by a computer. Unscrupulous marketers can "shill" for products that make them a higher profit, he said. Movie studios could flood recommender sites with high ratings of their own movies.

Shit. I hope marketers don't start gaming audioscrobbler.
posted by Tlogmer at 5:55 PM on January 30, 2005

What about music, hmm?
posted by Voice of God at 6:45 PM on January 30, 2005

to an obscure personality tester called What torent.com

And here I thought the industry was afraid of torent sites.

they have extracted the odd truth that if you liked the slacker-grunge classic "Trainspotting," you might like the saccharine yuppiefest that is "You've Got Mail."

Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a girlfriend. Choose a movie theater. Choose a soothing refreshment. Choose a seat off to the side, in the back.
posted by dhartung at 6:59 PM on January 30, 2005

Scary.
I still place a lot of faith in movielens. Whattorrent sounds silly, and also appears to be down.
posted by ITheCosmos at 7:10 PM on January 30, 2005

Netflix is usually eerily accurate with their predicted ratings.
posted by kirkaracha at 8:21 PM on January 30, 2005

Dhartung: What?
posted by andendau at 8:26 PM on January 30, 2005

I used MovieLens and I found it rather unhelpful.. I specifically refrained from rating some movies I have seen just to see whether its judgement of my seen movies would reflect my own. And half of the time it didn't - I remember seeing high recommendations for movies I would rate very lowly and the other way around.
posted by gregb1007 at 8:27 PM on January 30, 2005

andendau- Dhartung is skillfully quoting the main character from Trainspotting.
posted by HyperBlue at 8:33 PM on January 30, 2005

If by quoting I mean paraphrasing, that is.
posted by HyperBlue at 8:36 PM on January 30, 2005

Whattorrent - trying for a clever name, I guess.
posted by Gyan at 8:36 PM on January 30, 2005

Movielens is absolutely brilliant, not just for functionality but also for it's absolutely perfect user interface, a rare pleasure. Thanks for the link!
posted by fvw at 8:54 PM on January 30, 2005

Kirkaracha, beware: I remember reading that the suggestion system on Netflix is skewered toward the distributors that give them the best prices on their DVDs.
posted by muckster at 8:57 PM on January 30, 2005

all my "movie soul mates" are in Spain. Odd.
posted by trinarian at 9:02 PM on January 30, 2005

From the site:

WHY MOST OF MY MOVIE SOULMATES ARE FROM SPAIN?
Please be patient. People from over 100 countries have registered in filmaffinity, most of them because of the 'word of mouth'. But in Spain the most important newspapers and magazines have published reports about our site. This is the reason why more spaniards have registered so far. PLEASE HELP US SPREAD THIS SITE WORLDWIDE!
On April 2004 FilmAffinity was choosen as one of the best 100 undiscovered websites by the prestigious US PC MAGAZINE. Thank you ALL!
posted by HyperBlue at 9:25 PM on January 30, 2005

I linked What to Rent here a while ago. Their site is my favorite of the ones mentioned in the article. Their approach is a little diff than collaborative filtering and uses your mood to choose movies. I've always though collaborative filtering was just a fancy way to say- "stereotyping algorithm". Firefly did that years ago and has since gone south.
posted by AVandalay at 9:34 PM on January 30, 2005

the suggestion system on Netflix is skewered

Yeah, I heard a comedian talking about it just the other day.
posted by kindall at 10:01 PM on January 30, 2005

?
posted by muckster at 10:17 PM on January 30, 2005