I'm impressed. It gave me what I thought to be a small, weak data set, but the recommendations were better than those I get from Netflix, which has much, much more of my data to work with.
I can tell you exactly why Netflix makes such poor recommendations, and why almost anyone can do better with modest effort:
Netflix has to give recommendations for you from the 6000 movies that it's currently showing[1]. They can't recommend movies that they don't have. Whereas Taste.io can choose from the entire universe of ~500,000 movies.
An example should make this clear: If you liked The Godfather, it's an easy prediction that you'll like The Godfather: Part II and Part III. Suppose Netflix is currently showing The Godfather, but not the sequels. They cannot recommend the sequels to you. But Taste.io is not bound by that restriction; they can in theory recommend any movie that exists. It's much easier to find matches among 500,000 movies than among 6000.
[1] Netflix has just 6332 movies in the USA as of this date and even less in other countries (eg., 4365 in Canada). Most people are surprised by how few movies Netflix actually has. The Netflix user interface makes it very difficult to get a good impression of the number of movies; you can't just scroll alphabetically through the entire list for example. Source: http://netflixcanadavsusa.blogspot.ca/
Seems they could have a not yet available category that would let people pre-order; they could recommend a far wider swathe of content then.
https://torrentfreak.com/netflix-uses-pirate-sites-to-determ...
Really? I've always heard such negative things about Part III that I never bothered to watch it.
That is, I'm curious how so many folks are claiming it is doing a great job.
With DVDs, the greater selection means better recommendations.
> they only have around 6000 movies available at a time
And came up with amazing recommendations of really cool movies I've either watched and loved, or haven't seen but always wanted to. Even the top pick for "movies from this year" was the one movie where I saw a trailer and said WANT.