Yosi Glick's Smarter Movie Recommendations

Movie recommendations suck. Or so says Yosi Glick, the founder and chief executive officer of Israeli startup Jinni. Watch a film like The Usual Suspects online, he says, and a lot of sites will recommend Se7en, another crime thriller starring Kevin Spacey. That kind of simplistic matching isn’t nearly specific enough, says Glick. The former is a twisting-and-turning heist story that audiences find clever. The latter is a disturbing, gore-filled tale about a psychopathic killer. Fans of the The Usual Suspects are far more likely to enjoy the Ben Affleck crime caper The Town than David Fincher’s dark detective story.

Glick knows this because Jinni has spent the last several years doing for film what Pandora did for music. The startup has created what it calls the Entertainment Genome, an online catalog of movies and TV shows described by thousands of parameters that determine whether viewers love or hate something. That includes obvious things such as cast and director, but also more nuanced data like the mood, look, and source material.