Jinni, “Last.fm for movies”, now in Public Beta

If you’re looking for something to watch tonight, here’s a smart and slick way to find it. Movie and TV recommendation service Jinni has just come out of private beta and now anyone can sign up.

The idea behind the site is to help you find a movie or TV show to watch easily and quickly. Jinni uses The Movie Genome as the core of its recommendation engine. This records deep metadata about releases, such as mood, tone, plot, and structure.

After searching for titles similar to ones you like, or using a string of keywords (such as “journalism new york ambition love”), Jinni displays a blanket of shows and films it thinks you will like. You can then hone the results using sliders to adjust how well-known, serious, realistic and fast-paced your ideal TV show or film would be.

Digging deeper, the site offers personal recommendations based on a ‘Movie Taste Test’. It’s not quite as smart as Last.fm’s ‘scrobbling’ method of discovering your taste, but until someone works out a way of automatically logging everything you watch it will have to do. US users can connect their Netflix account to the service and get recommendations based on their viewing queue. You can also create a ‘Movie Circle’ with friends to aid with choices.

Tying the whole thing up, once you’ve found the perfect film or TV show, Jinni offers links to third party sites to (where available) buy, rent, download or stream your choice.

Jinni isn’t the only service doing movie recommendations. Likeaholix, still in private beta, is a recommendation service for a wider range of products while Flickchart is planning to introduce recommendations in the future. For now, Jinni offers the best way I’ve seen of whittling down the myriad viewing choices out there. It’s a quality product and is well worth a try.

Here’s a video that explains the interface.