Google has purchased Twitter movie recommendation service Fflick today for $10 million, with the deal expected to close by the end of the month.
Fflick uses Twitter “sentiment” to rate movies, showing positive and negative comments, as well as how many people are Tweeting about a certain film.
For example, on the front page is “The Green Hornet,” which is showing an 81 percent “like” rating on 66,000 tweets.
By signing in with your own Twitter account, you can see comments from anyone in your own network.
Furthermore, you can use the service to buy tickets, add movies to your Netflix queue, and retweet any post you see.
It is unclear what Google will use the service for.
Result for: queue
Rental giants Blockbuster and Netflix have won a patent infringement suit this week over their customer notification email systems, successfully defending against a lawsuit filed against them by Media Queue.
Media Queue and video game rental company GameFly settled out of court for the same lawsuit in March.
The patent allegedly violated was Media Queue’s “243″ technology in relation to contacting customers by email to notify them of their account statuses.
Result for: queue
Subscribers of Netflix‘ online DVD/Blu-ray rental service have been complaining about receiving damaged or cracked discs from the company. “Over the last two months, we’ve had probably four to six Blu-ray discs in a row arrive with small cracks at the edge of the disc that render it unplayable,” says Pete Brown, whose wife has been a Netflix subscriber for three years.
Blu-ray is structured significantly different to DVD in that DVD is comprised of two 0.6mm thick polycarbonate discs with the data recorded to a thin metal substrate in between, while Blu-ray is a single 1.1mm polycarbonate disc with the data recorded at the top, and protected by a 0.1mm coating. The Blu-ray discs circulated by Netflix may be more affected by the process than DVDs, and you have to remember Blu-ray is still a very young format.
“The coating is supposed to protect the discs but it could also be making them more brittle,” says Adrienne Downey, senior analyst at research firm Semico. “Ultimately Blu-ray is a new technology and they are still working the kinks out of it.” The problem can’t just come down to the discs however, as BlockBuster customers don’t complain about damaged Blu-ray titles as much.
For Pete Brown and his wife, the experience has been particularly bad. They added Babel to their queue and received a cracked disc. Upon receiving a replacement disc of the same movie, they checked and found that it was also damaged. To make it worse, the same thing happened the third time too. “At a point, my wife was like, maybe they are sending us same thing to us over and over again,” said Brown.
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