With the announcement of the 2013 Oscar winners right around the corner, we’ve decided to crack the genetic code of an Oscar winning movie. We’ve compiled the Oscar winning titles of the main categories throughout the 21st Century (best picture, actor, actress and director, from 2000 until today), analyzed and cross referenced their genes according to the Jinni Entertainment Genome, and compared them with the genes of this year’s nominees. The following infographic displays our findings:

The Genes of an Oscar Winning Movie - by Jinni.com

Technorati Tags: Oscars, The Master, Flight, The Impossible, Silver Linings Playbook, Beast of the Southern Wild

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After sixty years in hibernation, the TV guide is finally awakening to innovation. The static grid of shows and airing times that granny loved getting in the mail each week is crumbling under the strain of hundreds of linear channels, DVR, VOD and over-the-top internet streaming services and a new generation of consumers who expect a fast, personalized discovery experience. Providers can feel the winds of change brewing and are investing top talent to develop the next generation of guides. The following are 10 challenges and opportunities the industry must master if it wants to continue to keep customers happy.

1) The Couch Potato is Here to Stay

This is not an insult, simply a fact. When we sit down in front of the TV we want to watch something good and we expect it to be easy to find. After all, we’re not in the mood to work. Users want the act of finding something to watch to be as effortless and enjoyable as watching it is.

2) The Paradox of Choice Requires Personalization

Too much choice is overwhelming and is a barrier to consumption. The guide must give quality, personalized recommendations to help users overcome the fear of regret and so the guide becomes your best salesperson.

3) Content Selection is Meaning Driven

What do you want to know about a movie before you decide to watch it? Basic metadata isn’t much help. A rich, human description of the mood, style and plot elements gives us a real feeling for the movie and allows us to overcome the fear of regret and decide if we want to see it.

4) Future-proof the guide for an on-demand world

On-demand video is growing fast and now is the time to future-proof the guide. Service providers that don’t move quickly are at risk of choking future consumption with an antiquated guide.

5) Building Trust Between Man and Machine

Trust is what fuels recommendations to spur action. How can humans learn to trust machine-made recommendations? A discovery engine must be able to explain, in human terms, everything it does.

6) There is No Such Thing as ‘Average Taste’

Our tastes are as distinct and varied as we are. Sometimes I enjoy a witty humorous movie about couple relations, other times I’m in the mood for stylized, exciting movies about space travel and saving the world with androids and alien. You can’t average out things like ‘aliens’ and ‘couple relations’ to get a mathematical estimation of my taste. Yet this is exactly what most so-called ‘personalized discovery’ engines do; bunch everything a user likes together. If we are going to deliver a truly personalized experience that will help consumers find content they will enjoy, first we must recognize that each individual is unique and his or her tastes include several distinct types of content.

7) Keeping Content Fresh is a Challenge

Movies and TV are special, that’s why we love them so much. But that’s also why finding and choosing the right content is such a difficult process. We expect endless fresh programming, to fit our specific preferences and to match the exact mood we’re in at that moment. If the guide fails to lead users quickly to content that suits their taste and mood, they will blame the provider and come to the conclusion that there is ‘nothing good to watch’.

8) Humans seek meaning, not data

We have all been trained by web browsers to think in keywords, but human communication is more than a collection of key words wound into a Boolean string. Just try asking Google to recommend a ‘ feel good witty movie about couple relations’ – you won’t get useful results. The next generation of guides needs to speak in casual human language and deliver relevant and accurate results.

9) ‘Lingua Franca’ of Video Content

The only way guides will be able to communicate with users in a meaningful language is by adopting a normalized unified language or ‘Lingua Franca’ for describing entertainment content. This Lingua Franca will allow the breadth of entertainment content to be described in a single descriptive language irrespective of the producer, director or script writers. From the consumer perspective, all content can be understood in the same natural metaphor.

10) Separating the Social Wheat from the Chafe

Our entire industry seems caught up in the latest Social TV buzz. All the tweets, updates, ‘likes’ and ‘+’s have created massive amounts of TV and movie related social media data. But this kind of random chatter doesn’t drive consumption and it doesn’t enhance the television experience. Why? Because most of your friends don’t share your taste in TV and movies. If Social TV is going to truly enhance the discovery experience, we must be able to identify those few friends that have similar tastes and use them as a source of high quality social recommendations. THAT is social TV.

*An abbreviated version of this article first appeared in Multichannel Magazine

Technorati Tags: Next Generation TV Guide, Next Generation, TV Guide, Social TV, DVR, VOD, Linear channels, on demand, personalized discovery, personalized tv, couch potato, paradox of choice, content, video content, TV, movies, future proof, on-demand, recommendations, movie recommendations, Lingua Franca, Yosi Glick, Jinni, discovery engine

Popularity: 3% [?]

It’s open season on recommendation engines. In an article last month in Time focused on Pandora, Lev Grossman offered up this dire analysis of the impact of recommendation engines:

Will we eventually surf a Web that displays only blogs that conform to our political leanings? A social network in which we see only people of our race and religion? Our horizons, cultural and social, would narrow to a cozy, contented, claustrophobic little dot of total personalization.

Just the other day, Shane Richmond responded in an article in The Telegraph titled “Relax. Recommendation engines won’t replace humans.” He (reasonably) predicts that engines will never be our only basis for choosing what to listen to, who to date, etc. In fact, new technology can also foster “human-driven connectivity” of the kind seen on Twitter: “a massive source of unexpected connections and serendipitous links.”

Is that the best we can say for recommendation engines – that at least they’ll never entirely dominate our decision-making process? Since even the smartest recommendation engine can’t speak in its own defense, we’d like to chip in with a word or two.

Our Lives Aren’t an Endless Series of Happy Accidents

Lev Grossman writes –

A recommendation engine isn’t the spouse who drags you to an art film you wouldn’t have been caught dead at but then unexpectedly love. It won’t force you to read the 18th century canon. It’s no substitute for stumbling onto a great CD just because it has cool cover art.

This is all true. But the vision of our lives as non-stop serendipity (if not for algorithms) seems a little overly optimistic. Let’s say you want to watch TV. If you’re like the average viewer, you have access to hundreds of channels, thousands of VOD titles, and you might be considering web and DVR content too. Faced with that much choice, you’re likely to end up flipping to a show you’ve watched before or selecting from a “most popular” list online. Recommendation engines can actually help you out of this rut, by suggesting shows you might not have even heard of, but catch your interest because they fit your tastes.

Recommendation Engines Don’t (Necessarily) Care What’s Popular

People usually gravitate to popularity, not diversity. That’s because we’re overwhelmed by too many options (the Paradox of Choice). Much, though certainly not all, “human-driven connectivity” is likely to expose you over and over to the same short tail of content. As the “Trending” list shows, the majority of movie and TV talk on Twitter is about blockbusters and new releases (seen today: Karate Kid).

Admittedly, recommendation engines that use collaborative filtering – the familiar “People who liked X also liked Y” – also tend to recommend already-popular content (because that’s what most people like). But recommendation engines like Pandora’s and Jinni’s, which focus on understanding content, can make recommendations based on attributes you enjoy, factoring in popularity to a limited extent or not at all.

Algorithms Come in All Shapes and Sizes

Not all recommendation engines create the same experience, as noted above. For example, Jinni acknowledges that people have varied tastes, depending on mood and context, by creating a multifaceted taste model for each user (we call it “Entertainment Personality”), so recommendations will always take users in several directions.

And recommendation engines don’t necessarily exclude human-driven recommendations; they can actually facilitate them. Jinni identifies “taste neighbors,” people whose tastes overlap with yours. Viewing content your neighbors have enjoyed takes you beyond the comfort zone of your circle of friends to get recommendations from a wider variety of people who share some of your interests.

Happily, we don’t expect people will ever live blindly by algorithms. But recommendations engines can play a part in making our lives a little more serendipitous.

Technorati Tags: recommendation engine, recommendation, movie recommendation, Pandora, Twitter

Popularity: 2% [?]

The red carpet is laid, cameras are flashing, and ambulances are standing by to handle the weak-hearted. As the limos start rolling in, thousands of white - and silvered-haired fans (and some bold ones), who’ve been standing in line for days aided by walkers, wheelchairs and caretakers, scream ecstatically to the point that false teeth fly everywhere…

OK, OK, OK, it’s the first…

And while I don’t really expect the exact picture described above, I’m sure that retirement home residents in the area of The Egyptian Theatre, The Chinese Theatre and the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel are pretty excited and overwhelmed by waves of nostalgia and memories.

The people at TCM have organized a rather original event – the first film festival to honor classic Hollywood titles. Original and classic don’t quite go together, but it is rare to have a festival dedicated solely to classics, dating back to the 20s with Safety Last, Metropolis and others, and with “new” titles dating back to the late 60s.

It could have been a rather moldy event, but it seems to be vitalized by several incentives. Check out the all-star cast that will attend the screenings and share stories and anecdotes with the audiences: Jean-Paul Belmondo (grannies, put on your best nightgowns and go save front row seats) will attend the 50th anniversary screening of the new wave classic Breathless; Mel Brooks will get a star at Hollywood Boulevard and discuss The Producers; Eli Wallach will present The Good The Bad and The Ugly (where’s Clint? probably too young to attend…); Eva Marie Saint and Martin Landau will share their memories of working with Alfred Hitchcock on North by Northwest, and a rare public appearance by the actress Luise Rainer, who recently celebrated her 100th birthday (!), introducing her 1937 film, The Good Earth, which earned her the second of two consecutive Oscars.

Interesting events will include a screening of a newly restored copy of A Star Is Born; The North American premiere of the full length, restored Metropolis; a nostalgic panel The Greatest Movies Ever Sold: Classic Movie Marketing Campaigns; the panel A Remake to Remember: Hollywood’s Love Affair with Updating Movie Classics, with John Carpenter and Charles Shyer; The Hustons: A Hollywood Dynasty celebration, which will screen a trio of films in the presence of Anjelica and Danny Huston, and a special poolside screening at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel: Esther Williams and Betty Garrett (almost 90 and still acting!) will present a screening of Neptune’s Daughter, with a pre-show performance by the synchronized swimming troupe, the Aqualilies – campy, I know, but still fun.

Additional rare screenings of old, restored or 70mm movies will take place all over (check all screenings and events here).

Among the rest of the guests: Peter Bogdanovich, Ernest Borgnine, Tony Curtis, Stanley Donen, Illeana Douglas, Curtis Hanson, Buck Henry, Darryl Hickman, Norman Lloyd, Leonard Maltin, Nancy Olson, Richard Rush, Douglas Trumbull & Jon Voight.

Now, if we would have reduced the years of the accumulated ages of the guests mentioned in this post, from the current year, we would have gotten back in time to approximately year one! (not the movie, god forbid)

Aging jokes aside, this could really turn out to be a nice, nostalgic event – and a tour de force for these acclaimed industry veterans. So enjoy, and remember: Age before beauty!

Here’s a taste of what’s coming:

Technorati Tags: film festival, TCM film festival

Popularity: 3% [?]

It’s hard to miss that TV is changing – increasingly online, on-demand, and personalized. Business models, like consumers habits, are in flux, and the landscape of companies keeps evolving. Mashable recently published an intriguing list of companies that are reinventing online TV. As a response and complement to those selections, here are 5 more companies that, as we see it, take a key role in reinventing online TV.

1. Netflix

Netflix’s popular Instant Watch streaming service has become for many a complement if not a supplement to broadcast and cable TV. With delivery via Roku, Xbox, PS3 and others, Instant Watch provides a comfortable living room experience. Now planning to expand internationally, Netflix is no longer just a DVD rental company, but an important player in online TV.

2. Comcast

Innovation by small startups might make a better story, but there’s no denying that the big players have a big influence on the future of TV. Perhaps none more so than Comcast, who with their recent acquisition of NBCU now have first access to some of the best premium content around, not to mention influence over the popular online service Hulu. With the launch of Fancast Xfinity TV, Comcast is moving at “light speed in cable TV terms” (as Videonuze put it) to provide an online TV experience that enhances - but does not replace - cable service.

3. Blip.tv

What is the place of indie content in the evolving world of online TV? The question has two sides: how many people will watch indie content, and how indie creators will monetize their content so they can continue their work. With even YouTube shifting focus toward more profitable premium content, Blip.tv, the self-described “next generation television network,” provides a model for both sides of the question, extensively syndicating content to viewers around the Web and offering profits to successful creators via a 50/50 ad revenue share. It’s not the only model for how quality indie content can continue to enrich online TV, but it’s one that seems to have staying power.

4. LG

As LG has identified, the next big thing in the world of HDTV is internet capabilities. LG’s NetCast Access Entertainment integrates Yahoo Widget Engine, Netflix, YouTube and Vudu content in selected HDTV models via Ethernet connectivity directly to the television. This looks like the right direction for consumers who demand a simple, seamless experience without set-up, set top boxes, and accessories.

5. Jinni

(Of course!) Unlike typical TV, over-the-top (OTT) models where content is completely on-demand create a challenge for anyone in couch potato mood. “Channel zap” as the simple - and only - way to choose what to watch is a thing of the past. We see Jinni as the next generation TV guide, with a unique focus on the user. Based on our semantic Movie Genome, Jinni creates a one-of-a-kind model for each person’s taste, to enable selection by mood and personal preferences.

Technorati Tags: online TV, Xfinity, Netflix, Comcast, LG NetCast

Popularity: 4% [?]