--Company Has Recently Announced Partnerships with OpenTV, SeaChange
Jinni, an Israeli company that has developed a semantic search-and-recommendation engine that it says is based on "content genetics and user psychographics" (note: the company, which last week announced the appointment of cable-industry veteran, Mike Pohl, as CEO--see the article published on itvt.com, September 30th--recently announced partnerships with OpenTV and SeaChange International--see the articles published on itvt.com, August 12th and September 9th--and also teamed with NDS on a demo at the IBC show in Amsterdam last month), on Monday launched a public beta of its consumer destination site, http://www.jinni.com.
According to the company, the site is designed to help consumers find movies (including movies on DVD and in theaters), TV shows, and Webisodes that match their personal "tastes and moods," and features a "unique Taste Engine" that combines semantic search, personal recommendations and user profiling. The company also announced the launch of what it calls "social interaction features," and announced a promotional campaign to benefit the Best Friends Animal Society. "Jinni's consumer site is now available free of charge for users around the world," CEO Pohl said in a prepared statement. "We believe that our holistic approach that combines semantic search, personalized recommendation, and detailed taste profiling will ultimately change content selection across Web, TV and mobile devices. We are excited to offer users an easier, more effective, way to sift through all the entertainment choices on the market today, which is both painless and best reflects what they want to watch."
Core features of Jinni.com, according to the company, include semantic search (i.e. search that can find results for such semantically/syntactically complex queries as "thought-provoking sci-fi" or "action movie with a surprise twist"), personalized recommendations, and integration with (including the ability to hyperlink to) the catalogs of such content providers as Netflix, Apple iTunes, Amazon, Hulu, and LOVEFiLM, among others. The site also features what Jinni calls the "Movie Personality Sketch," billed as a visual presentation of the essentials of each user's unique movie taste; as well as various community features. "While Jinni is not a social network," the company explains, "social interactions are often central in choosing what to watch." The company says that its taste profiling solution supports "strong social features," including descriptions of shared tastes with other users, and "taste neighbors, enabling people to connect with others who share their preferences."
Jinni says that its service is powered by what it calls "the Movie Genome," which it says contains several thousand "genes" that are assigned to each title to describe mood, style, plot, setting and other features, and that provide "a rich alternative to the usual genre language." According to the company, new titles are automatically indexed via analysis of user reviews and metadata, using a proprietary "Natural Language Processing" solution. This automated process, the company says, makes for efficiency, consistency and a diversity of viewpoints from analyzing multiple user reviews.
In order to encourage usage of the new site, Jinni is organizing a promotional campaign called "Watch Movies for a Change," that it says will see it making a donation to the Best Friends Animal Society (a no-kill animal rescue charity) for every new sign-up.
