How to include movie showtimes in Google Movies?

Question

I am making the website of a movie theater, and I want Google Movies to index the showtimes I publish on the website.

Does anyone know if there's a way to do this? Maybe using Microformats? Or exposing this information using RSS or something similar?

Answer 1

I don't believe that Google harvest the show times from the theater web site, they probably buy/tap into a reliable source for that.
At most you need to make sure that the theater is listed under Google Local.

Answer 2

This depends on the region. Google anoints specific companies that scrape or attach to Cinema APIs for sharing session data. This is a common feature of cinema-specific point-of-sale solutions. Whoever is the anointed company in your region that google uses, contact them and tell them how to get to an exposed endpoint for your session data.

Otherwise, they try to scrape it, usually with many errors.

Personally, I find Google is acting very poorly here and building silos of data mining companies that can abuse this data (Manipulate it). This should be an open public API that a cinema can simply make available on their website and Google can attach to automatically based on creating a company in the google business application and like defining the opening hours, if the business is a Cinema, define the session times data endpoint.