Jinni Figures Out What You Want to Watch

If you’ve ever used a service like Last.fm or Pandora, you can probably appreciate how nice it is to have a piece of software figure out what you what music you’d like to hear based on what you already listen to. These are called content discovery engines because they use what they know about you to figure out what you might like. Now, Jinni provides us the same type of experiences, but for movies and TV shows. They just launched their public beta, so it’s worth a look if you can’t decide what to watch.

Once you sign up and fill out the basics on your profile, you’ll be asked a series of Like/Dislike questions regarding what you like to watch. It covers the types of Genres and Plots you might be interested in. This is only the beginning, though. Once you choose to view your Recommendations, you’re prompted to take the Movie Personality Test. This is a more detailed and specific test that takes you through rating groups of movies on a scale from Awful to Must See. Once you’ve rated 20 movies you like, you will start to see an analysis of your personal tastes.

After you start rating movies, the magic starts to happen. Jinni begins to tell you what movies you probably want to see. Sometimes, we decide to do family movie night. It often seems like we spend more time picking a movie than actually watching one. It’s painful. With Jinni, I can always get an idea of what I want to see. I can even connect with others on the site to collaborate on what we both might enjoy.

Jinni is a pretty slick service that I will probably end up using on the regular. Along with Pandora and Last.fm, it’s an example of how we can use computers to learn more about ourselves and to make us a little smarter. Not only does it find out what you want to watch, but it will show you where you can obtain the movies and TV shows. It will even like out to free content where available. Even if you’re just trying to remember the name of a movie based on a few random facts about it, the search is awesome and can usually find that movie that’s right on the tip of your tongue.