Why can’t local movie theaters look at public lists of films that people want to see and book their theaters based on that information. Especially since digital projection should lower the cost of getting a digital print to zero if peer to peer video distribution technology continues to be adopted and as h.264 continues to evolve into the standard for digital exhibition.

Spout.com provided the below widget that displays all the films I’ve bookmarked as wanting to see and they also make this information available in RSS.

Movies I want to see:

Step 1:

First I need some friends in New York City who would be into coming out to my loft to attend a movie night. What I need you guys to do is look at all of the movies that I want to see and check off “want to see” on any of the ones that you would also like to see. Then browse through spout.com checking off any of the other movies that you want to see. Then post your spout user name in the comments below.

The Contest:

Then I’d like to invite programmers to take a stab at using the RSS feed of the movies that I want to see and the RSS feeds that all of my friends want to see to create a new RSS feed of movies we should watch in my loft at my weekly movie night. The application should make this new RSS feed so it’s sorted with the film the most people want to see at the top and gradually down the list have the rest of the films. Each feed entry should contain the number of people that wanted to see that movie as well as the list of those people. This should be a web based application that can be installed on any server and the administrator can easily plug in 10 or more spout user names (or spout RSS feeds or similarly formated RSS feed). The application should spit out a live RSS feed that changes over time as the the other people remove films from their want-t0-see list. So if they’ve just discovered a new film then their RSS feed changes and the mashed up RSS feed my also change due to the new variable. This way we could wait until 1 day before the screening each week to lock in which movie we’ll be watching. Also the adminstrator should be able to add or remove spout names that are factoring the movie deciding process based on RSVP info. Extra points if you can some how integrate RSVP via email or some kind of iCal solution. But thats a bit more complex so not required.

The Prize:

The prize is a free Four Eyed Monsters DVD, T-shirt and Poster to the first person or group of up to 5 people who can post open source code and provide a working veresion on a server that I can use for my movie nights. But the bigger prize is that we will have created the missing link that will go on to revolutionize theatrical distribution of movies and revitalize the collective movie watching experience. And all it took was a little bit of democracy.