Startup Circle: How is FlickZee a search and discovery platform for Movies and Shows content available on OTTs?

The craze for OTT content like Netflix, Prime, Hotstar etc has increased a lot over the last few months. The pandemic has either exhausted the watchlist of many avid movie-lovers or brought in new movie-watchers. Either way, users at one will need to know what they should watch, and where. The latter is an important issue. Say, you have a movie in mind, but you don't know where to watch it. You check on Google and find a torrent link, which is illegal. That's where FlickZee comes in.

It is an aggregator platform that helps users find where to watch video content, legally. Thus, CiOL talks to Divyanshu Shukla, CEO and Founder of FlickZee to know more about the platform, its challenges and the future this sector holds.

1. What is FlickZee about?

FlickZee is a Search & Discovery platform to help users find What Movie or TV show to stream online. We tell users where to watch a movie online (legally). We call the program the Idiot box. The platform also curates 100s of parameters for every movie, curate movie collections and write crisp spoiler-free plot synopsis to entice users to watch a movie. At FlickZee, we believe no movie is good or bad. Every movie has an audience and every person likes a different kind of movie or shows at any point in time. We are now building a Machine Learning based recommendation platform which will help find a movie based on a lot of factors, like:

Personal Preferences – What kind of movies or shows someone likes, political drama, psychological thrillers, movies about LGBTQ etc.

Where is it available right now – The On-Demand Economy, needs everything, RIGHT NOW. So the online availability is also a major factor in finding what movie or tv show to watch on the streaming services subscribed.

Social Recommendation – Did any of my friends like/recommend it?

Whom to Watch with – If you are watching with a family, you would want to avoid movies with nude scenes, profane language

Mood – Are you watching after office, in a happy mood, in a tired mood, while eating food, Watching something serious or Watching to lighten up the mood.

2. How did you come up with the idea?

The genesis of the idea was a small incident at home while watching movies with family when the Tata Sky connection was removed, we started using Movies & TV shows on Mobile Apps of OTTs. To cast the content on TV, we bought a Chrome cast, since Amazon FireStick was sort of difficult to understand for Parents & they would need continuous guidance with that.

While watching the content, I realized that it is difficult to find where to stream a movie online, not easy to find out whether a movie or tv show is worth watching with parents or not and also to find a movie which everyone would enjoy watching.

The problem with streaming services is the number of options is insane! Which is good because you get the variety, but not so good because of the confusion it creates. In theatres, it is much easier because the number of options is very less and the decision is also more socially-driven with mutual taste & preferences.

3. How do you manage such a huge database?

We use a variety of methods to ensure the accuracy and stability of the database. We have built a dedicated iteratively improved Mapping algorithm. It maps the movie content available on different streaming services with our database. There are a lot of variations, like a movie with the same name released in different years, some OTTs even host just a trailer and not the whole movie and these get caught up while mapping.

Also, for every movie, we run machine learning algorithms which calculates relevant meta-tags for a movie and their relevance scores between 0 and 1. So for example fight club will score high on anti-consumerism, twisted ending & mind-blowing tags and low score on coming of age, war, world war kind of tags.

This tagging data helps us in recommending movies to users and creating movie collections so that users can make a decision based on their mood, preferences, streaming services etc.

4. What is the Idiot Box?

So Idiot box intends to bring back those good old times of TV when there was a movie playing on every channel. You never had to think and pick one yourself. If you didn't like a movie playing on a channel, you will just click on the Next button. Well, that's exactly what we are doing with the Idiot Box; to pick a movie randomly but unlike TVs, you can specify bare minimum filters as per your preferences.

Put some basic filters like Streaming Service, IMDb Rating, Movie or Shows, Genre, Theme and Language and Submit. Idiot Box picks a movie randomly for you, based on your filters and some intelligent filters it implements itself.

I myself get amazed a lot with the recommendations from Idiot Box on the FlickZee website. Like, I discovered the documentary "Chasing Corals" that is one of the few which talk about life underwater in so much detail and covers the Mass bleaching Event of Corals in Great Barrier Reef in 2016. Though I would admit that I had to press Next for like 10-15 times before arriving at this one. In moments like these, I realize how helpful this small feature is, at least to me.

5. What sets you apart from similar platforms?

We were one of the few early OTT aggregators in India. One of the things that set us apart is our approach to the problem. The Recommendation problem is a Data-intensive problem to solve with different solutions for every individual. Thus we initially focused on the Search & Discovery Part, where we broke the user's problem into 2 parts -

1. If a user already knows what to watch - he/she needs to find where to watch it - The Search Problem

2. If a user doesn't know what to watch but has some basic set of filters or type of movie in mind to figure out What to Watch - The Discovery Problem

Now there is a third piece to this; If a user has no idea what to watch and is completely clueless - The Recommendation Problem

The Recommendation problem needs a lot of accurate movies metadata and a high volume of user behaviour data to tune and train itself. We are now building algorithms of the tune which are being used by good recommendation services like Netflix.

6. The pandemic has affected every sector. How are you coping?

In tough times like a pandemic, people seek to various art forms as a source of liberation from the negative vibes outside. Art makes us feel liberated and that's what has happened with Movies and TV Shows as well. Users started watching a lot of movies in the pandemic times and that boosted the traffic on FlickZee, especially after 19th March when the First Lockdown had started.

7. Funding

Bootstrapped.