It's simple ROI. There is not that many movies this is a task that one doesn't need to scale with computers. Hiring a guy is likely much cheaper than investing on the software. Plus I am sure there are plenty of people who would like to watch movies for their day jobs.
On the other hand, I am pretty sure there is at least some degree of automated video classification at Youtube.
What happens when after a bus event? Someone else has to watch every film in existence? It is not enough to just watch the new films - you have to have a memory of all other films in order to make that association.
> Someone else has to watch every film in existence?
To some extent, all the film program students and film critics provide your backup reserves: they're watching tons of films on their own, and you don't even have to pay them until you hire them.
> VidArc was a tiny store in a mini-mall, with barely room to squeeze past other customers, but it made up for its size with the percentage of rare and obscure titles that were available, and with the knowledge of the film-nut staff, notably the cinema-obsessed and mile-a-minute talker Quentin, whose low-budget life at the time has been explored in several books. Denise's card was number 1410, and when I made my trek from Oregon in the Orange Monster (my '72 Olds Cutlass), I became a customer as well, discovering the world of strange and disturbing cinema under the tutelage of Quentin, Rowland Wafford, Gerald "Big Jerry" Martinez, Stevo Polyi, Roger Avary, and the owner of VidArc, Lance Lawson.
Seems reasonable to me that you could have a team of categorizers/critics.
That'd be several times more expensive of course, depending on how many people you added, but I think it also might improve the results if the team was picked well. Finding associations between movies is probably something a group of people can do more effectively than one person, since recall will be better.
There might be an issue of disagreements within the team, but I think at least finding associations between movies would tend to be fairly non-controversial. We might disagree over whether or not The Italian Job is a good movie, but we probably both agree that it is a heist movie.
On the other hand, I am pretty sure there is at least some degree of automated video classification at Youtube.