Tribune Media Services cleans up movie screening data with Placecast

Tribune Media Services (TMS), the largest provider of local movie theater listings in the world, is teaming up with location-based ad company Placecast to keep its movie listings as accurate as possible.

TMS will be using Placecast’s MatchAPI application programming interface to make sure its movie listings always refer to the correct place in the physical world and that the venue information is up to date.

The problem with location data is that there is no single source for it, which means that different sources have different ways of displaying a location, ie. the same physical place can have many different references to it. Placecast’s MatchAPI (which we’ve covered before here) goes through this data, making sure all the references point to the same location.

Providing showtimes for 71,000 screens in more than 13,000 theaters across the U.S., Canada, Europe, Asia and Latin America, TMS is the latest company to sign up with MatchAPI since its launch at the end of March – right now, over 350 companies have signed up for it, including travel and event content provider WCities, mass transit information source Urban Mapping, and restaurant ratings provider Buzzd. And, says Placecast, app developers are hungry for geo-location content to improve their applications. MatchAPI lets mobile app developers use content from different sources, such as the movie screening listings from TMS, in their own services.

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