I've been longing for a service like Last.fm, but for movies, for quite some time already. To my surprise, I had an e-mail waiting in my inbox last week regarding such a service. It's called Filmgator and it's still in beta, but the service works in the way you'd expect it to. FilmGator is a Finnish startup, based in Helsinki. The service aims to answer the question: "What are people watching?"

I've always liked last.fm a lot. It aggregates your music in the background and is able to pull up statistics regarding your music habits. I've tried to Google for something like this for movies every now and then because, even though there are a lot of movies produced, I feel that finding good movies is a lot harder than finding good music.

Not only does FilmGator aggregate the movies you've watched, but it is also a review site for movies. On every film page, the user is able to review the film or add comments. Furthermore, there's a possibility to add it to your timeline. Your watched movies are placed on a timeline and the user is able to go back their history and see when they've watched what.

While FilmGator has the basic functions in use, it pretty much lacks the possibility to find new movies through suggestions. The only way to find new movies at the moment is through timelines and watchlists of other community members. The idea in itself is great and I like the basics of it, however, I do wish that FilmGator had implemented a bit more sociality into the service - even though it is still in beta.

There is no business model in the service yet and when it comes to movies, the last.fm streaming model might not work. This doesn't mean FilmGator has no way of making money though. In fact, there are plenty of ways. For example, if they are able to create a good suggestion engine for movies they could license the technology to other vendors. FilmGator will soon have a lot of data on how people watch movies and how sociality affects this. This is valuable information when designing such technologies.

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Pål H. Alvsaker, November 30, 2009

I would rather recommend www.jinni.com for this

Lasse Holopainen, November 30, 2009

Thanks Antti for the coverage!

I've been following ArcticStartup since 2007 and it's great to see you guys are really promoting entrepreneurship and not only writing generic news from the scene. Keep up the good work!

PS. FilmGator is still undergoing rigorous development and indeed a recommendation engine is in the drawing board. That is the most natural way to utilize the data gathered from users' movie watching history.

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