A nice piece on filtering the right way
I've been on the edges of at least 2 movie-listings site projects in London, UK where we have about 150 screens within 30 minutes of what the americans so quaintly call Downtown.
It's a source of continual frustration to me that these sites continue to be exact ripoffs of printed listings, when they could do something much more useful -
The most typical cinema planning question in London is
"What are all the movies are showing within my reasonable travelling radius starting at about time X?"
It is sometimes "What is the nearest place showing 'The Matrix Reloaded' ?"
Cinema chain brand managers egos notwithstanding, it is never " Warner Village is the only cinema I like, what is on there?" (the most universally supported browsing mode)
I gave this idea as a present to Tony Ageh a while back, so here's hoping the beeb may do something with it...
Followup: since I didn't make what I meant clear enough, I'll try again. This is what I want a cinema listings site to ask me:
Enter your postcode, and the time you want to go, and it returns results, ranked by distance of the cinema showing the film, with the film name and start times on the same page filtered within some plausible margin (2 hours) later than the start time I've chosen.
"I've decided to go the pictures with that sexy girl, kay, at 8pm tonight. What are all the films we could go and see?"
Virgin.net's was better than most, James, but still pretty woeful, since (as I remember), the emphasis was on on cinemas, not movies. And you didn't use postcodes, so when I lived in Kennington, it used to fail to offer me any of the 60 gazillion West End venues that were only 15 minutes tube ride away, but did tell me about the cinema in Tooting, that I'm never going to visit.