Part III of the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules 2021 replaces a certificate you apply for with a classification you make yourself. Nobody certifies it in advance under those Rules, which also means nobody defends it for you if it is wrong.
This is not legal advice, and it is not a certificate. It is a structured way to think about your own film against the classification factors those Rules set out.
Nothing has been described yet, so there is nothing to classify and this page is not going to assert a category for a film it knows nothing about. The answer — the category, the descriptors to display and the block you can publish — arrives at its own address, so you can send the result to a producer, a festival or a lawyer and they see exactly what you saw.
Our ladder is ours: Everyone, 13+, 16+, 18+. It has no U/A 7+ rung, so a U/A 7+ film is listed here as Everyone. That fold is our product decision, not something the Rules say, and the two schemes are not equivalent.
On these answers you would tick nothing on our content-warning checklist. You can still add a note in your own words, and on a film where you hesitated over a level, that note is usually where the hesitation belongs.
One thing this platform does that the Rules do not. The paragraph at the top of this page is about the Rules, under which nobody certifies your film in advance. Here, we do look: a rating is required before a film can be submitted for review, an admin approves or rejects every film before it is published, an admin can correct a rating, the warnings or the note afterwards — with the reason recorded, and with the film still on sale — and we can decline a film or take one down. None of that is certification, and none of it is anyone approving your classification under the Rules. It is us deciding what we carry.
There is a fuller list of what to have ready — export settings, poster, trailer, captions, payout details — in what you need before you upload.
The Rules ask for the classification and the descriptors to be displayed prominently — at the start of the film, and wherever someone is deciding whether to watch it. Both halves matter, and the second is the one people forget. A rating that appears only once the viewer has committed has not informed the decision it exists to inform.
In practice that means the category and its descriptors on the film’s page above the button that starts a purchase, on a festival submission or a press kit that describes the film, in the description wherever the trailer lives, and on a card at the head of the film itself. On this platform the first of those is done for you: the rating and the warnings you give us render on the film page, above the buy button, so nobody reaches payment without passing them. The card at the head of the film is yours, because it is in the video and we do not edit video.
A descriptor is the specific reason for the category. “Strong language” tells a parent something; the category on its own tells them almost nothing. Where you can be more specific than the tags above without writing a synopsis, be more specific.
Answer the factors above and press Classify, and the block appears here: the classification, the descriptors, and what kind of classification it is — which is the part most people leave out and the part that stops a reader assuming a certificate exists.
This table is ours, not the Rules’. The Code of Ethics lists the factors and the categories, and the Schedule gives the guidelines for applying them; neither publishes a lookup table, and anyone who shows you one has written it themselves, as we have here. Read down your factor, disagree with a cell if you think it is wrong, and classify accordingly — the answer above is a floor to argue with, not a verdict.
| Factor | None | Mild | Moderate | Strong |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Themes and messages | Nothing that asks anything of a viewer — no threat, no cruelty, no adult subject.U | Ordinary difficulty: a death, a separation, bullying, a fright that resolves.U/A 7+ | Subjects that assume some experience: grief, addiction, discrimination, crime, sex as a subject.U/A 13+ | Sustained treatment of suicide, sexual violence, abuse or cruelty — inside it, not referring to it.U/A 16+ |
| Violence | None, or slapstick with no consequence.U | Scuffles and threat; violence implied, off-screen, or over before it lands.U/A 7+ | Visible injury, weapons used, some blood — the camera does not linger and the cost is shown.U/A 13+ | Brutal, bloody or prolonged; torture, sadism, or violence the film is pleased by.U/A 16+ |
| Nudity | None.U | Brief and not sexual — a back, a silhouette, a birth, a body seen in passing.U/A 13+ | Shown clearly and held, still not sexual in intent.U/A 16+ | Full nudity in a sexual context.A |
| Sex | None beyond affection a child would not notice.U | Kissing, verbal references, a sexual relationship that is clear but never shown.U/A 13+ | Sex depicted, but through framing, cutting or sound rather than shown outright.U/A 16+ | Sex shown explicitly, at length or in detail.A |
| Language | None.U | Occasional mild swearing or insults.U/A 7+ | Swearing throughout, or a few of the strongest words.U/A 13+ | The strongest words repeatedly, or abuse aimed at caste, religion, gender, disability or sexuality.U/A 16+ |
| Drugs and substance abuse | None.U | Drinking or smoking in the background: incidental, not dwelt on, and not approved of.U/A 7+ | Drugs spoken of but not seen, or use implied; drinking or smoking the film dwells on.U/A 13+ | Use shown in detail and made to look worth doing, or instructive enough to copy.A |
| Horror | Nothing frightening.U | Jump scares and tension a younger viewer recovers from before the credits.U/A 7+ | Sustained dread, disturbing images, a threat that is not comfortably resolved.U/A 13+ | Prolonged terror, graphic body horror, or cruelty filmed to be endured.U/A 16+ |
Only nudity, sex and drugs reach A in this table. That is a judgement and it is contestable: a film whose violence or horror belongs to adults and nobody else exists, and if that is yours, classify it A over the answer this page gave you. Going up a rung costs you some audience. Going down one costs you the argument that you classified honestly, which is the only thing self-classification has going for it.
It is not a certificate, and there is no certificate to get for an online release. Certification under the Cinematograph Act 1952 attaches to the public exhibition of a film: a cinema is the common case and not the only one, a screening outside a cinema can still fall within it, and whether a particular screening does is fact-specific. What that Act does not regulate is an online release, which is where the Rules above come in. Nothing here has been seen by the Central Board of Film Certification, the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, or anyone else; no government body has approved this result and none endorses this tool. There is more on that boundary in no CBFC certificate is needed to release a film online.
It is also not an answer to whose duty this is. Whether a filmmaker selling tickets to one film is a publisher of online curated content turns on facts about how you operate rather than on anything about the film; the guide sets out both sides and we do not resolve it. What we can say is what we do: we operate this catalogue, and the obligations that come with operating it are ours. What stays with you is that the classification and the descriptors are honest.
None of this is legal advice and we are not lawyers. It is our reading of instruments we have named so that you can go and check them, as at the date at the foot of this page. The Rules have been amended before and are argued over periodically. If the answer matters — the content is contentious, a distributor or broadcaster is involved, money is committed, or somebody has already complained — pay a media lawyer for an hour. An hour of a media lawyer’s time is the cheapest line item in a film budget and the only one that can save the rest of it.
Free to use, nothing to sign up for, and nothing you type here is stored or sent anywhere — the answer is computed from what is in the address bar. Last updated 2026-10-21.