We take a look at a new service that combines streaming movies with a recommendation engine and integrated social network.
Even if none of your real life friends share your love of film, the internet has meant that if you're a movie buff you likely share your passion for the silver screen with others through social networks. What if there were a service that combined social network type movie discussion with streaming movies, while also providing recommendations based on your taste as well as providing a movie news feed? Enter
movli.com!
Unlike many sites, movli makes it commendably easy to register. All you need is a twitter, google+ or facebook account. It's simply a matter of one click and you're instantly registered - no filling out of intrusive forms or unreadable captchas to figure out.
Once registered you can begin providing movli with info on your movie taste. If you're a Netflix user you'll be familiar with the following process - clicking movie titles you've seen and rating them. Behind the scenes, a complex algorithm crunches the numbers and begins to use your data to provide recommendations. Do this for 25 movies and you'll unlock a personal 'genome'. Even after just rating my initial 25, the recommendations were pretty close to my taste -
The Grand Budapest Hotel, Amour and
Manhattan were among the first to appear.
Movli provides some advanced filtering options. Apart from the usual genre breakdown, you can search for movies with a specific runtime, or movies that have won specific awards, including Oscars, Cannes, Sundance and more.
Next you can start getting social and adding friends. You can search for people by gender, location and age. Visit their profile and you'll receive tailored recommendations based on how your taste corresponds with theirs.
What us movie lovers like to do most of course is watch them, and movli provides a catalogue of movies you can view absolutely free. The usual public domain classics are there (
Night of the Living Dead, Carnival of Souls, Detour), but there are also some surprising additions like
Dancer in the Dark, The Grudge and
Mirror. Again, these can be filtered by decade, runtime, awards etc. Some of the free films are from the past couple of years, including a 2011 film called
Waffles, which naturally intrigued us. For the movies that aren't free, links to where you can rent or buy them online are helpfully provided.
The final aspect of movli is the 'feed'. This gives you updated movie news from sites like
Film School Rejects and
/Film, and there's a 'personalized' tab that provides news based on your genome. This feature is unique to movli, as no other movie website allows you to filter news in this way.
