Say I want to search for something to watch on my next movie night. Whether online or on VOD, I’m comfortable with the options: view most popular, browse by genre, or enter a title or actor. The experience is familiar – yet it always falls flat. The text menus, lists of titles, thumbnail posters… None of it captures the exciting visuals, gripping effects, moving stories, and great soundtracks that I have in mind. The popcorn smells, pushing crowds, and overheard sounds effects in the average local cinema are more compelling.

In the entertainment industry, it is widely accepted that the key to consumption is the user experience. This is all the more true in our on-demand era, when each person chooses his or her own entertainment of the moment. The range of choice is intimidating, from top hits to long-tail titles, making the discovery experience more important than ever.

Yet there is a general industry consensus that the user interface is an unresolved issue. In other words, despite the time, money and experience thrown at the issue, the entertainment industry has not yet invented a disruptive interface for content discovery.

The conventional answer to complaints about a non-intuitive user interface is, “Bring in a better designer.” But is lack of design talent the issue? I believe not. Replacing the physical experience – the local record store owner’s great recommendations, the bookstore’s colorful display of new paperbacks – with an appealing online experience, requires a fundamentally new approach.

The core problem is not layout or graphics, but rather the underlying data that shapes and limits the user interface. Why do movie discovery interfaces, from e-commerce websites to VOD services to movie machines, all look so remarkably alike? I attribute this to the homogenizing influence of the data. Genres – originally meant for back-end catalog organization – have been the basis of movie search for fifteen years and more. There is a gap between how we think and talk about entertainment and how we search for it that an interface alone cannot solve. While a typical user review, for example, includes experiential descriptions like “made me cry” or “food for thought,” search engines support flat genres and keywords.

The key to the next generation of users interfaces lies in a new approach to data. Multi-variant data simply gives designers a better structure to play with. Take semantic search, which many see as the key to organizing large amounts of information in future, providing users with intelligent answers based on the meaning of their queries. In entertainment, this could mean that “happy” is understood in context of other moods like “feel good” and “heartwarming” but not necessarily titles or broad genres like “comedy.” Semantic search will inevitably be a source of design as well as technical innovation.


Whether semantic, real-time, people-powered, or another combination, the next generation of search will better reflect real entertainment experiences. And this new data will support and drive innovation for disruptive, intuitive user interfaces.

By Yosi Glick, Co-Founder and President, Jinni

This entry was posted on Monday, May 4th, 2009 at 12:13 pm and is filed under CEO Views, Guest Authors, Movie, Verticals, Video. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.