Letterboxd


Letterboxd is an online social networking service co-founded by Matthew Buchanan and Karl von Randow in 2011. It was launched as a social app focused on sharing opinions about, and love of, film, and is maintained by a small team in Auckland, New Zealand. The site is meant for sharing its members' tastes in films. Members can use it as a diary to record their opinions about films, keep track of films they have seen in the past, write reviews or make lists of films and showcase their favorite films, as well as meet and interact with other cinephiles. Films can be rated, reviewed, included in a list and tagged with relevant keywords.
As of the first week of October 2018 members have marked over 200 million films as watched, doubling the previous benchmark of 100 million set on 15 May 2017.

Website

History

The site was launched at Brooklyn Beta in October 2011, and attracted more than 17,000 beta testers over the next six months. It transitioned from private to public beta on 24 April 2012, with all pages becoming publicly visible. Membership remained invitation-only until 8 February 2013, when it was opened for public use. The site also introduced a tiered structure, with both free membership and paid memberships which allowed access to multiple features including personalized "Year in Review" pages.

Technical aspects

Anyone can read content on the site. An account is required for users who want to participate. All members can rate films, review films and tag them with relevant keywords. They may also maintain lists of films they have watched or want to watch, and interact with other members. Lists can be made public or private to the user. A follower model enables members to follow along with the activity of others on the site.
There are two paid membership tiers.
Pro membership includes:
Patron membership includes all Pro features as well as the following:
For Apple devices there is a universal iOS app for iPhone and iPad offering most of the website's functionality, and a cut-down tvOS app for Apple TV. The iOS app supports several system-level integrations including Siri Shortcuts, URL schemes and Handoff, allowing control via voice commands and Shortcut workflows. There is also a full-featured app for Android users available in Google Play Store.

Film data

All film-related metadata used on the website, including actor, director and studio names, synopses, release dates, trailers and poster art is supplied by The Movie Database. Because of the high annual fees for using IMDb's data, the developers decided to opt for TMDb instead, which is openly crowdsourced. They partnered with Justwatch.com to include online viewing options for films in September 2019.