This application explores a project that had the potential to evolve into a real-world opportunity that has not yet been brought to market. Social media and entertainment are both billion-dollar industries with giant corporations competing with rapidly growing startups that seem to appear overnight. iRate is an application that links movie theaters to customers and generates value-added insights for both. The system is self-sustaining as customers write reviews, other customers provide a consensus on ratings, and the theatres reward the customers who are the most helpful while gaining valuable data into customer behavior. The backbone of the iRate application is a database that stores customer details along with their reviews and endorsements, as well as information about the movies they are watching.
iRate is a social media application where users can review movies and get rewarded by the theaters for providing quality content that has been peer-reviewed by other users. With the pace of society ever increasing, the way people spend their spare time is of utmost importance. People are turning to social review sites like Yelp and Google Reviews to determine which activities, restaurants, or even the right doctor deserve their time. RottenTomatoes is currently the goto source on whether to see a movie or not. Unlike the other social review sites, it lacks incentive for the user to post reviews and provides little benefit to theatres, especially regional ones. Most large theatre chains have their own loyalty program – AMC has Stubs and Cinemark has Connections. These programs are point based and essentially leash a user to their line of cinemas but does not effectively engage the user. The iRate provides a platform to connect theatres with their audience in a captivating way that provides real rewards based on engagement while providing the business with crucial information about their showings.
There are three components to the application including the potential for a mobile application, a web application, but the focus of this project is the back-end underlying database. The database aims to store information about the users, their reviews, and movie attendance.
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