Movies Anywhere adds new, AI-powered list feature

Movies Anywhere is best known as the service that syncs together purchased movies across different retailers (so that you can, say, watch movies you bought on iTunes through Google Play, or vice versa). But the service also has a fairly robust app of its own, which is getting a new machine learning-powered list feature to automatically generate lists that sort your library based on what movies you like.

The feature, aptly named “My Lists,” offers two options: automatically generated lists — like gathering all the Star Wars movies together or creating a list of the romantic comedies you own — and standard user-created lists. Users will be able to edit the automatic playlists (to add or remove movies that they feel fit the collection), and those lists will update over time when new purchased movies are added to your library.

The way it works is simple: Movies Anywhere has already created thousands of those automatic playlists (my library offered me “Period Pieces,” “High-Energy Action Movies,” and “Whimsical Fantasies,” among others). It then scans users’ libraries of purchased movies, and using both the titles that a user owns and their watch history, selects what it thinks are the most relevant playlists to show (which is where the machine learning comes in).

The new feature is the latest addition to a series of updates that the company has added to its app, following other additions like Screen Pass and Watch Together, to try to convince customers to spend more time in it. But the My Lists feature also highlights the limitations of the service: namely, that it only works within the Movies Anywhere app. The playlists created there won’t sync to other services, nor can they draw on watch data on other platforms to help the algorithm decide which playlists to surface for customers.

The new My Lists feature should be rolling out to Movies Anywhere users starting today.