FilmFish, the human-curated movie recommendation engine, has a goal: End the hours spent sifting through crap on Netflix. Founder Phil Sull teamed up with the likes of actor Topher Grace, film critic Joyce Kulhawik, film producer Daniel Posada, and others to hand-pick what’s worth watching in streaming video. The site groups movies into lists, so if you want to watch a gangster movie, there’s a curated group ready for viewing.
Why are recommendations so important? In the good old days, you had eight channels, and whatever was on TV, you watched. Now you have tens of thousands of options at your fingertips, and it makes you miss those old days where you’re not faced with the paradox of choice. The next frontier is a system that makes sense of it, instead of leaving you sifting through Netflix for a half-hour. Human beings are the answer to this—you see this across the board. Algorithms are still missing the essence of what makes content content, whether that’s a song or art or a movie. Look at Apple Music; the whole marketing platform is around human curation. It’s a countermovement away from the increasingly intelligent machine, closer to the curator of yesteryear. We saw that movement taking
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