June
3
Ultimate Movie Site Adds Games and Apps
Citing buzz words like "aggregation," "community," and "challenge," marketing vet Stuart Halperin and partner Andrew Sachs have launched the beta version of their long-in-the-works Ultimate Movie Site, which Halperin calls a "new online destination connecting passionate moviegoers worldwide." UMS, staffed by five full-timers, boasts info on over 50,000 movies and over 900,000 movie-related people (with data licensed from Baseline Studio Systems). An "official" launch with marketing push is still in the offing.
So far, Halperin believes, no one has pulled together massive IMDb-scale film content with a lively, engaged fan community. The site has an engine that finds meta-tags for a movie like I Love You Man that connects with red carpet clips as well as any related merchandise, from a poster to a soundtrack or DVD, easily purchased with a click. Affiliate partners include Netflix, Movie Tickets (where Halperin once had a marketing gig), Amazon and the Broadcast Film Critics Association, which provides critics' choice ratings. More original content is in the works; for now both the Reel Geezers and Curtis Hanson interview producer/director/author Tony Bill about his book Movie Speak. The site will collect commissions from sold items, solicit ads and sponsorships, and offer up business-to-business research data on its consumers.
Is a site that tries to do so many things for so many people taking the right approach? Isn't the web favoring niche destinations now? At the recent Digital Hollywood confab in Santa Monica, even advertisers were talking about the benefits of narrow-casting. "We're offering movie fans an opportunity to find what they need and connect to each other in one place," says Halperin. "Why should you have to go to seven places and hop all over to connect all the dots?"
Giving people games to play on the site is part of Halperin's concept: each site member rises through the community ranks based on how well they're playing games. There's a cool Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon-inspired app that shows all the connections to any movie or actor. I whiled away some time on the new multi-level word search game Box Office Quest, but soon got bored. More pertinent, the Site boasts another feature: Netflix subscribers can punch a "watch instantly" button and stream such movies as Batman. The Site also recently launched the Facebook app Movie Degrees, which compares fave flicks with FB friends.
Most people habitually go to IMDb for their movie data, Fandango or Movie Tickets for movie times and tickets, Rotten Tomatoes for reviews, Flixter, Twitter, Facebook or highbrow The Auteurs for their film community. The Ultimate Movie Site does pull more material together on one site. But will it pull movie fans away from their daily routines?
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I think it's a promising idea, but personally when I think of movies I think imdb. In fact, I use it as a verb when talking about searching, kind of like how people use google as a verb for searching.
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Posted by: evan | June 03, 2009 at 12:43 PM
I think the Ultimate Movie Site is a great new one-stop destination for all things movie related and look forward to watching it evolve. Love the Netflix app.
Posted by: Sue Brownlees | June 03, 2009 at 05:57 PM
I love the idea of a great one-stop destination for movie fans. What a great user interface. And you know what they say about building a better mousetrap...
Posted by: jane Windsor | June 03, 2009 at 09:56 PM
Combine this with a streaming site like http://www.viewpipe.com and I would signup in a heartbeat.
Posted by: sam | November 04, 2009 at 08:37 AM