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Comment by JeremyMorgan | Hacker News Reader

Hollywood Video's corporate office had a guy, one guy whose job it was to just watch movies. He'd watch them, make sure it was categorized properly, then create associations with other movies that "you might like" if you like this movie, and vice versa. All kept in a spreadsheet that we later plugged in.

We also thought there should be an algorithm, but he was pretty dang good at what he did.

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It's simple ROI. There is not that many movies this is a task that one doesn't need to scale with computers. Hiring a guy is likely much cheaper than investing on the software. Plus I am sure there are plenty of people who would like to watch movies for their day jobs.

On the other hand, I am pretty sure there is at least some degree of automated video classification at Youtube.

I think it does need to scale.

What happens when after a bus event? Someone else has to watch every film in existence? It is not enough to just watch the new films - you have to have a memory of all other films in order to make that association.

> Someone else has to watch every film in existence?

To some extent, all the film program students and film critics provide your backup reserves: they're watching tons of films on their own, and you don't even have to pay them until you hire them.

> VidArc was a tiny store in a mini-mall, with barely room to squeeze past other customers, but it made up for its size with the percentage of rare and obscure titles that were available, and with the knowledge of the film-nut staff, notably the cinema-obsessed and mile-a-minute talker Quentin, whose low-budget life at the time has been explored in several books. Denise's card was number 1410, and when I made my trek from Oregon in the Orange Monster (my '72 Olds Cutlass), I became a customer as well, discovering the world of strange and disturbing cinema under the tutelage of Quentin, Rowland Wafford, Gerald "Big Jerry" Martinez, Stevo Polyi, Roger Avary, and the owner of VidArc, Lance Lawson.

http://toddmecklem.com/quentin.html

Seems reasonable to me that you could have a team of categorizers/critics.

That'd be several times more expensive of course, depending on how many people you added, but I think it also might improve the results if the team was picked well. Finding associations between movies is probably something a group of people can do more effectively than one person, since recall will be better.

There might be an issue of disagreements within the team, but I think at least finding associations between movies would tend to be fairly non-controversial. We might disagree over whether or not The Italian Job is a good movie, but we probably both agree that it is a heist movie.

What about aggregating movie reviews and classifying movies based on their reviews. Would be an interesting problem regardless of accuracy.

    I am pretty sure there is at least some
    degree of automated video classification
    at Youtube.

there's definitely collaborative filtering.

This reminds me of Derek Sivers' album recommendations for CD Baby:

http://sivers.org/hi

Basically Sivers just listened to every album and did the same thing, and when he couldn't get to all of them he hired someone to do it full time.

How many hours of new programming do they add a day? How many people would it take?

That is basically what Netflix does. They have teams of people trained to watch movies and tag them with lots of metadata -- really precise metadata. Then the algorithms take over and do the actual recommendation.

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/01/how-ne...

Very interesting. Did he enjoy it or did he get bored? Did he have to watch some horrific films? Did he feel like his brain was being polluted as more degenerate films come out? Did it affect his perception of reality?

Just interested.

Spare a thought for the people at the BBFC in the UK who in addition to having to watch every feature film to rate it also have to watch all the pornography videos to rate and check for legality.

I attended a university debate once between a BBFC censor and a female porn director. Watching the two of them talking about "counting knuckles during a fisting scene" to check that the UK requirement that at least one knuckle is always visible was a truly bizarre experience. The BBFC man had the look of an individual who has stared into the heart of darkness for a little too long. He had some excellent stories though!

If anyone does organise debates, talks, conferences etc in the UK on associated topics I can highly recommend getting in touch with the BBFC. They're really keen to engage with the wider public rather than just be two signatures on the screen just before a film comes on.

Have the BBFC ratings dropped though? I mean, stuff that was horrific and rated as 18 in the 1970s is now routinely part of films rated 12 or 12A. The sheer amount of violence that is part of films has significantly risen.

Only a few times have I watched a full three movies in a day, and I found it exhausting. I think having to watch movies all day every day would be much harder than it first sounds.

Same here. Watching the Star Wars trilogy in one day was exhausting, and also perhaps a bit sad. Watching the entire 6 films would be killer.

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