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A movie-ratings Web ... and why meta-data will matter to movie makers Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Why should movie makers concern themselves with movie ratings, which are for movie watchers? Before the turn of the millenium a movie maker would not have had to concern herself with such things, because movie making was still an entirely specialized enterprise. A team of marketing professionals, advertising agencies, public-relations consultants, and press agents ("flacks") would take care of getting the word out about a movie. The movie maker would have been left alone to concentrate on her own special concerns — mostly, creative and technical elements. In those days the basic question that had to be answered before any other was, "How do I get enough money to buy film stock, and how will I pay a laboratory to process it into an exhibition-quality print?" In the era of digital video, the questions are, How can my audience find my movie? and How can my movie find its audience?

The era of the specialist is over. The relationship between a movie maker and her audience is now a direct one. A movie maker must concern herself with distribution, because the ways she makes a movie may affect the way it would flow through distribution channels which will be online and therefore, automated. Indeed, there will be precious little difference between distribution and delivery. (I wonder whether the word "exhibition" — which used to mean the "showing in movie theaters" and had been, until the turn of the millenium, the main venue for motion-picture entertainment — will be used much any more. Its place in the movie vocabulary will have been supplanted by "delivery.") She must concern herself with distribution or delivery, because the ways a moviegoer will find out about what movies are available — and the ways that the moviegoer will make choices — will have changed.

The current ways of influencing a moviegoer's choice. Today, movies find an audience in a "natural" way which has not changed since 1900 — gossip (so-called word of mouth), and publicity media (formerly newspapers and radio, now TV) — in short, talk. When, in any given neighborhood, there were, at most, a dozen movie houses, that was enough.

Even with five hundred cable channels, TV commercials and publicity have been adequate to steer movies to audiences, and to steer audiences to movies.

The present system does not scale well when the choices go from hundreds to hundreds of thousands.

When there will be five hundred thousand movie choices for any given evening at the iTunes/Apple TV, that will not be enough. Unless, of course, your movie is the beneficiary of a big publicity campaign, or a big advertising budget. Talk still works if you can shout louder than everyone else, and shout to captive audiences. If yours is an independently-financed movie, you might want a better way for your prospective audience to find your movie.

Tomorrow, a moviegoer's search for the right entertainment will be helped by automation.

<#me> a foaf:Person;
movie:seen {<#titanic> dc:title "TITANIC"}.
 Click here to access the object that's linked to this item.

Soon, the way a movie is made — the technical choices in its construction — may affect the efficiency of its delivery to its audience. Some information about a movie will be built into the movie itself. The computer programs by which movie goers find and retrieve a movie, may soon look into a movie file to discover information about it, and use that information to select it or not.

If information about movies would be organized and evaluated into meaningful statements, moviegoers — or, rather, their computers — would be able to pick shining gold needles from haystacks of GooTube.

When that day comes — and it is just around the corner — a movie maker had better decide what information will accompany her film. She had better pay attention to the methods by which it will accompany her film, too.

Getting those data into the minds of prospective audiences is important for the success or failure of any motion picture. Right now that is done inefficiently by a combination of advertisement, marketing, and publicity (actually movie studios think they do it exceptionally well and with great precision, but that is because they like doing it the same way they have been doing it since 1900, and they want to keep doing it that way for as long as possible, not because it is the best way. And their measures of "success" are confections of self-serving Hollywood voodoo and business-school received ideas — but that is another story).

There are categories of information online and in the print and broadcast media — Oscars®, box-office receipts, reviews, parental guidance ratings, "thumbs up/thumbs down" ratings, 4/5 stars, etc. A trailer (preview) is meta data — information about a movie. A movie's parental guidance rating may be a significant element in a person's decision about seeing a movie or not. For some, Ebert and Roeper's "thumbs up/thumbs down" rating is critical. Some people even go based on the movie's box-office receipts, as a rough-but-ready measure of popularity.

Today there is plenty of information, but not much understanding. The automation is not good — search engines and even movie-ratings are entirely unsatisfactory: they only provide more information — when trying to make a decision, more information is actually confusing, not clarifying.

What is wanted is some sort of understanding of the information — not merely summary, but something which concurs with the moviegoers own ethos.

What is not available is a summary or a table or a "cloud" of all the category descriptions of a movie — some way to make meaningful comparisons and to draw conclusions.

What if you want to sort reviews of movies on the basis of any of these categories? is the question raised by Tom Morris. (This is a follow up to Use movie ratings to make maps to kid-friendly movie theaters.)

There is no movie taxonomy to sift the needles from the straw — no system or sequence or hierarchy of organization, which would provide meaningful ways to grasp what is important and to let go what is trivial.

Sooner or later, a taxonomy will be devised. Maybe it will be deployed in a great online system, perhaps by Hollywood or by a big Internet company, or some other big enterprise. If that would be the case, then the taxonomy will serve the interests of the shareholders of those enterprises. They will reflect neither the interests of movie makers, nor those of movie goers. Movie makers — and not only Steven Spielberg and other millionaires — ought to participate in the making of standards. Right now, it is cheap to make a movie. It could be cheap to create and append meta data to a movie. But it could be turned into a very expensive system, controlled by one of the big companies which already control information. Now is the time for movie makers to speak up and participate in the making of standards.

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