One service that promised to boost an actor’s Starmeter ranking has shut down this week, but there are a number of similar third party sites still in operation.
Amazon.com’s IMDBPro this week raised rates for its movie, TV production database by 15 percent to around $150 a year (for existing subscribers). It also launched a new service billed as a high-tech way for casting directors to find actors for movies and TV – in part using a proprietary ratings system called Starmeter.
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Even as the new service dubbed Pro Casting was being introduced, however, reports surfaced on several websites that the Starmeter ratings can and are being manipulated by third party promoters, if not by Amazon and IMDBPro themselves.
The website of one of those third party services, IMDBPromo, which promised to improve your Starmeter score for payments ranging from a couple hundred dollars to more than a thousand dollars, went dark Wednesday after it was specifically named in an article that appeared on the web site Herald de Paris. A company source for IMDBPromo said it shut down at the request of IMDB…..MORE