Netflix never used its $1M algorithm (2012)
thenextweb.com
thenextweb.com
They didn't really need an algorithm in the first place, they just brainstormed what would sound the coolest to developers.
(The following is a tangent.)
To put it another way, using a slightly different kind of situation, I don't want BigCorp's AI watching everything I do to "serve me better", but I'm very interested in the idea of a local AI that watches everything I do and helps me be N times more efficient, while I maintain full control. I don't care if the local AI uses the same data-gathering, data analysis, etc. concepts as BigCorp's AI to accomplish the goals I want it to accomplish.
Caveats include:
- The local AI is Skinner-boxing you or similar. This isn't about the AI having conscious malicious intent; it could be a design defect. Also, a local, offline, open source video game can still be addictive.
- The risk of the system being compromised / manipulated, and all that data on you being exfiltrated.
Netflix compensation is fucking bonkers.
Isn’t this ideal? Find out if it’s for you quickly? And if it’s not move on to something that you actually will like doing?
If you knew you were going to stay there 9 years and make a tractor trailer load of money and love the culture you’d take the offer.
If you’re not sure which is more likely and you really like the maximum upside then you should take the offer and get out in 9 months if it’s not for you.
And yes, if I knew that the average new hire at Netflix lasted 9 months, I’d still probably take it. I think I’m much better than average and I’d want to test myself at a place that is challenging to work at. If I’m good enough to get a Netflix offer I can probably get another offer in the future.
The average person should do what the average person wants but the upside of a long career at Netflix seems pretty darn high and might make an average person an above average person.
I know I don’t, having worked at places where I barely recognized the company from the ridiculous things people said about it on the internet.
Or maybe I’m the problem, wherever I go.
By comparison, several years ago, I was regularly streaming Netflix content without any trouble. One day I streamed a show on the HBO app on mobile data and it ate up almost all of my month's data usage. I guess it's behind the scenes work, and not so exciting, to e.g. stream a smaller resolution for a mobile phone, but in moments like that you realise there are a substantial amount of things to think about when making such an app.
I just assumed that Netflix had different video formats on its' servers, ready to go, and when the app requested the video it also sent the screen size/resolution to get the smallest file size, that would also look good on my phone. If that was 480p then all well and good, it was fine to watch.
It was a while ago now, but IIRC the amount HBO used was pretty horrendous, like a GB for 30 mins or so of video, so I guess they just downloaded a big file and let the player on the phone handle that.
Like a say, a few years ago now so the situation may well be better with HBO now.
Changing the way Hollywood and content licensing works is trivial? https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/lifestyle/arts/how-netflix...
Yeah, it's not rocket science to build a streaming service using AWS or GCloud lego blocks in 2024, but remember that Netflix started streaming in 2007.
Currently following some interesting permaculture projects. I find the type of work these people do so useful and clever really.
Yes.
> including their talent strategy
No.
It only means they're doing one thing right: income > expenses. Beyond that, revenue tells us nothing about how they're increasing it.
That would be profit, not revenue. Still, in terms of profit they went from $25M to $4.5B.
Combining discs and streaming in one subscription provides customers with the best of both worlds. Need something to watch right now? No problem, we have an excellent streaming catalog and you're going to love Stranger Things! Want a specific movie or show, maybe Friends or The Lion King? We've got that too, it'll be in your mailbox in a couple days.
And if some customers choose to forgo either the digital or physical side of the package, it doesn't cost Netflix anything.
I think Netflix got cocky. When Netflix separated the plans, streaming rights were cheap and Netflix's streaming catalog was growing quickly. They didn't foresee the market becoming so competitive.
Continuing to offer discs would have allowed Netflix to hedge their bets and avoid relying on rights-holders. The original content push did that too, but at a much higher cost. If keeping DVDs meant Netflix could produce a few less original shows per year, that seems worth the trade.
They saw that streaming was the future but that mailing discs would let them build a big brand early on, but they took the disc market very seriously and optimized it.
Once you're streaming the cost structure is like this: Fox or Disney or someone like that will charge them $X /month/sub but it costs $Y to create a piece of content, independent of how many subscribers you have. There is a crossover point where you have enough subscribers that it makes sense to own.
Only the original Xbox One had a disc drive integrated.
It’s always fascinating that people say things that are verifiably untrue. Like, really?
EDIT: Definitely shows the shift to online game delivery in a way that I have not seen before.
Source: I own all of them except for the One X.
I have an Xbox One X and there is no disc drive. I remember having an Xbox One before that did have a disc drive.
When I looked it up, the first search results are news outlets saying the Xbox Series X/S are not going to have disc drives...
You can get a PS5 with a built in disc player.
Ironically one of the reasons I bought a PS3 was to play Blu Ray movies. But during Covid I ripped all my physical media and got rid of them, I only use the disc model of the PS5 to play my old PS4 games.
Isn't there a slightly wider hole the left (other side than the Xbox log) between the top part and the black bottom part? You should be able to fit a disk there even if it's pretty hard to notice...
e.g.: https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/61+XhWct5lL._AC_SL1500_....
I loved greencine and physical netflix but those killed themselves, seppuku, it seemed like, a long time ago.
Were you referring to resolution instead? The picture quality of a DVD (even properly digitized) would be atrocious by modern standards (high bitrate 1080p)
this afternoon and saw 5 DVD or Blu-Ray players that cost about $20. They even had a funky VCR with a USB port (to digitize movies on your computer) for $12.
That assumes you have some kind of TV set. I'd think a lot of people get their entertainment on a laptop or phone, VR headset or something like that and don't have a TV.
That would be the best of all worlds. Just scan the Redbox with your Netflix app, look at the top 1000 discs in there. And just get it.
(Again this would be better than what pirates can offer. Cheap AND easy AND good.)
You can always buy most films. It's just relatively expensive (and not instant) for a one-time watch. Of course many are available for a la carte buying/rental via streaming as well.
I was a die hard subscriber to the end. I would have happily paid more money per month to get access to 4k disks as well
I think that's fairly well-known at this point, though I agree it should be more widely known.
I think the real secret is that Netflix discovered that their users aren't trying to watch the best movies, they're just trying to kill time. Apparently you can substitute good films for generic junk and people will keep their subscriptions.
Really, the business model for Netflix has some weird perverse incentives. They make money from monthly subscriptions. They lose money when actually streaming content to users. So the ideal user from their standpoint is one who keeps paying but never watches anything.
Thus, the company is incentivized to put out just enough good stuff that you can't miss that you don't cancel, but otherwise produce garbage you don't want.
In recent years, this has still not been a sure bet month to month, but over a year, 12 scores are pretty much guaranteed.
Amazon will rent you most movies for <$4, so 4 movies per month is the number for Netflix to beat, not 1.
Also, most movies I might go to a theater to see cost substantially more than $4 on amzn.
You can rent movies on many services like google, itunes, youtube, etc... But for shows, you only have the option to buy each episode, which makes no sense.
But I think that I'm a very unusual consumer in that respect. If I liked to watch TV series more then I'd be bingeing those, and that's where I think Netflix really attracts consumers, not movies. I don't think there's an economical way to do a la carte viewing of TV series on a regular basis.
And, yes, on an hourly basis they're probably comparable but renting a film now and then feels reasonable to me whereas paying per TV episode feels expensive.
With the fragmentation, streaming services start to make more sense if you're someone who likes to have the TV on as background. They make less sense if you watch a few hours of deliberately selected video a week.
Netflix rarely does good shows that are created exclusively by them. My go to example is the Witcher series. What they are amazing at though is picking up projects from small scale studios and helping them produce it. Nimona, Klaus and Arcane are some of the stuff I remember on top of my head. Wish they stick on to that, helping small scale studios reach a wider audience
Unlike netflix where I downgraded my plan to the lowest tier, there's literally nothing on it and they also keep on cancelling good tv shows. I think they should focus on serious stuff and work with more indie directors. But then again I can't blame them because they're just following the trend.
(This is part of what economics means by "markets are rational" - the irrational people go broke.)
Netflix and gyms are pretty similar here.
Maybe Netflix should add loads of learning content so people feel good about their sub.
Everyone decided "I can cut out the middleman and keep the money in my pocket" and they all lost hugely on that strategy.
I got free apple tv+ with an ipad I bought and I couldn't find a reason to keep it after the free trial ran out.
I roam different video services, switching every month or two. I don't have time to need all the services at once anyways.
Also, apple has the problem where they have more money than they know what do with - if they can figure out a profitable movie and tv studio then it would be an honest to god diversification.
I don't believe the person you're replying to is overstating at all, and certainly not 'considerably'.
It makes sense to me that the first thing to go is the other streaming services, as Netflix has such a strong mindshare, but their lack of content is more noticeable all the time, and I think there will be a swing back to cheaper services with at least different content, if not better.
The numbers disagree. Net income and profit margin was doing great even before password sharing crackdown.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/NFLX/netflix/net-i...
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/NFLX/netflix/profi...
I don't follow that closely but I hadn't heard anything either way about how things were going.
And it appears to be working. I was telling this girl the other day about why I canceled Netflix years ago, because they frequently didn't have whatever I searched for. She insisted that "no, Netflix has everything!" So we proceeded to search for various things with her account, including the final straw that made me cancel. Netflix proceeded to not have a single thing we searched for.
Examples are: Exit to Eden, The Others, and Baccano!
How does this happen? Why do rights holders want movies killed?
Mainly they are used for recruiting, new ideas (simpler versions get implemented), and proof of concept (if we did this really really well, what would it look like, should we spend 2 engineering years on it?)
I was just an outsider, but I guess at least I learned about passive levitation.
You really cannot trust anything anyone says, especially large companies. They basically always lie and manipulate and are at a constant advantage to those of us who find dishonesty morally wrong.
I don't think they ever said they would use it necessarily either? I feel like it was obvious that it wasn't going to capture all of their actual requirements - your algorithm could be slow or expensive or difficult to adapt to new requirements or difficult to adapt to new data etc etc.
Husband.
Wife.
Husband and Wife.
Husband and 4th grader.
Wife and Pre-K.
Husband, Wife, 4th grader, and Pre-K.
4th grader.
Pre-K.
4th grader and Pre-K.
Each of those has a totally different viewing pattern and preferences.
I also think half of my viewing is with my spouse. We are pretty aligned in some shows but we are different enough where “My List” really means when I’m alone, and we are missing an “Our List” for when we are together.
But neither my wife nor I have any interest in Home Alone 2 being in our personal profile Suggestion lists.
And when my wife is trying to bring up Home Alone 2 to watch with my daughter, she doesn't need my daughter seeing Naked European Romance Drama showing up in the Continue Watching.
My friend Steve comes over. He and I both check in.
It makes recommendations for shows it predicts we would both like.
And you will need to fill them up with data separately.
You need all the team and know-how that has the maturity to maintain such an algorithm. Not just the ML skills. But all the bazillion ops, data quality, and many other things that go around it.
I've worked with a lot of teams that have one smart person building stuff off to the side, in R or a Notebook, and then nobody knows how to productionize it. They try to throw the algorithm over the fence. Even if the team somehow succeeds in getting it into an A/B test, it eventually falls by the wayside, unless they can build the team and workflow around that person / algorithm / methodology
In my view, this marks a cultural failure - and certainly not on the part of the 'one smart person.'
For example, compare this to Disney+. I vaguely know about every Marvel and Star Wars thing 2 years in advance, and usually vaguely know what order they're coming out, and I don't even know how I know this, somehow I just know. Okay, that's easy because it's basically 2 IPs. But ultimately Netflix is doing something similar behind the scenes, why haven't they succeeded at making me aware of what content I'm supposed to be hyped for?
To not understand the usefulness of recommendation algorithms almost feels intentionally contrarian.
Then again, as long as people pay for that experience, it will continue to be as unbearable as it is.
In addition to sucking in general, recommendation systems have this great property of radicalizing people politically.
The number of times I've had to scroll or even search to find the thing that I very obviously want seems intentionally maddening.
It's clearly not their main target, but it's also obviously still a target.
It was in the news a lot, and was discussed on a lot of tech sites. Plus it gets people talking about their recomendation algorithm, and makes people thing Netflix subscription is more valuable becasue it recommends good shows. It wouldn't be cheap to get the amount of media that they got through more traditional marketing.
The main one I don't think I would have doubts about is the recruitment. But, I don't recall them being a place that needed recruitment help, even at that time.
To be clear, I found the thing fun to consider. I certainly am not upset that they did it. I do harbor a gut feeling that its ROI is greatly overstated.
Not picking on you at all, just going on a tangent because I've been thinking recently about the good ideas that end up on the cutting floor because their impact, while positive, is intractable or completely impractical to quantify.
Some ideas (like this Netflix one!) are "obvious" winners, because they have a diffused, positive impact in many important dimensions – each of which is almost impossible to measure, but the integral of which is almost certainly greater than the idea's cost, probably by one or two OOM. If there's high conviction in an idea being a 10x idea, and attempting it costs quite little, it's better to do it now and maybe consider measuring it later. Who cares if it's 9x or 12x ROI, the point is it has a big margin of safety and large expected returns on capital.
But in a "we can't greenlight this project unless we can directly attribute it to positive motion in our KPI" org, these flavors of idea are dead on arrival. The double-kicker is that the cost of trying to measure these ideas is often greater than the cost of the idea.
For some ideas, especially when it's a rounding error on the company's annual budget, it should be OK if we don't invest much effort into quantifying the results. It's one of those rare set of ideas where it's anathema to the professional/investor culture of SV of the last decade, while simultaneously being how plucky Seed/Series A companies can punch above their weight.
Now, I think it is fully fair to say that this was very cheap for them to do. In which case, why not do it? But I think you would be hard pressed to give me a counter factual world that is believable where not doing this had a meaningful impact on Netflix's future.
I can certainly mostly agree with this. I just also think them producing their own shows was likely more impactful, and had basically nothing to do with this.
Don't get me wrong, plenty of moves in life are "win more." Such that I could see this one fitting that description. But a lot of "win more" choices are surprisingly low on the ROI side, when you control for everything else in that situation.
Of course making their own shows was more impactful in a bunch of ways. But, the investment is also so much more. A season of a show is in the tens to hundreds of millions.
But, the real difference is that Coke is, in fact, selling their own brand and products. For Netflix, they are largely selling access to other people's products. In a very real way, Netflix found an arbitrage opportunity for viewing movies. With how poorly the content owners calculated things, they got good deals at the beginning so that they could do well on their investment in the CDN infrastructure so that they could deliver a good experience to users with minimal unit costs.
This is, in a large sense, why Netflix is having to raise prices now. The content owners are starting to demand more money for that access, driving up their unit costs. Combined with a draught of original content, expect that they will lose access to their own productions in time. You can already see this with the likes of Daredevil.
My comment about Coca-Cola was to draw the analogy that just because they don't have trouble hiring (which you mentioned) doesn't mean it can't be helped.
If you saw a measured rise in hiring, I will trust you on that. My assertion here is largely on the trajectory that Netflix seemed to already have and how there is no clear "inflection point" in any of their numbers post this contest that I have been presented with. And probably more cynicism than makes sense for how little impact ML seems to have on any choices that Netflix seems to show.
More directly, though, if you were to plot subscriptions to Netflix over time across an unlabeled chart, would you be able to see this contest?
Take my challenge. Plot their subscribers and revenue over time, hiding the year/month. See if you can spot any sort of inflection where this happened.
It /could/ be that they would have seen declining numbers absent this. Such that this prevented a bad inflection on the chart. I don't know that I find that compelling.
Like, I get that you can't measure everything. There are plenty of reasons to believe that.
I just can't bring myself to accept the odd logic that "popular tech company got press coverage which was instrumental in their growth." Seems there is a circular logic at play there that makes this such that, even if it is true, it is not actionable for anyone else.
Put another way, popular things get press coverage by virtue of them being popular things. At large, as long as they don't implode in very terrible coverage, they don't have to do much to get more coverage. Just doing anything will do that for them. To that end, odds are high we would still have discussed this even if they only offered something silly like a lifetime subscription for the winning team.
Some scale for perspective: if this had a 10x ROI, they'd get $10mm for $1mm. At EOY 2009 (same year this competition was paid out), Netflix had a twelve-month-trailing Revenue of $1.671B. In 2006 they took in ~$1Bn. So it's 0.06% of annual revenue at payout time, 0.1% of annual revenue at announcement/green-light time.
The idea had a large margin of safety: in the worst case, nobody pays attention and you've generated some IP which would have cost ~$1mm to generate anyways, and which would theoretically increase retention (a top 3 KPI) by X%. And it had big upside potential, in the form of additional marginal hires, press/exposure of the core product in the news cycle leading to marginal subscribers.
Re hiring: I think it's totally plausible that it contributed to ~5% of 500 peoples' employment decisions since 2009.
Re subscribers: it's plausible to think it contributed ~1% to 10k peoples' decisions to subscribe, most of whom have retained to-date. It's classic "Brand Advertising" – and although it's difficult to quantify, it works.
Those numbers could be way higher, but it doesn't really matter if they were or weren't, the margin of safety, uncapped upside of the brand advertising angle, and low relative cost made it a bona fide good idea.
Edit: FWIW, that we're still discussing this idea in 2024 is more evidence that it was a good idea. This whole thread is full of Netflix's target demographic. We're all talking about how well-compensated and smart Netflix engineers are... You would never be able to purchase that kind of long-burn, compounding, high-expected-value attention for $1mm from any advertising network, in 2006-2009 or now.
I think I would push on the ~5% of 500 people's employment decisions. With the sizes of the teams that competed, I'd not be too surprised that the teams involved were largely the extent of who was directly impacted by this contest. Everyone else was as happy as those of us that read any of the blogs/articles that they would publish about their infrastructure. Which is not nothing, but probably hard to spot the difference. (Ironically, I would argue that the raised morale of the people that publish the articles are probably more measurable? Which, I confess I don't think is a consistent position from me.)
And I stress that I agree it was a safe thing to do. I am even glad that they did it. I just don't know that you could really convince me they would not have had the revenue that they had without doing this contest.
$1m to generate some publicity and attract talent? Sure. They're probably paying headhunters similar amounts in comissions each year.
More to the point, though, this is a bit of a tangent/deflection from my question. How do you assert the return on this $1m? This line simply says that no return was needed for it to be spent. It shows nothing to say how you calculate what is made from it.
Given the meteoric rise of ML/AI in the past few years, I'm surprised that Kaggle doesn't come up more often. It was all the rage 2013-2018...then most I heard about it was that it allowed free access to TPUs.
I don't see that as a universally bad thing. I feel this is actually very representative of the majority of ML projects that most organizations encounter. Most organizations don't have petabytes of data and a huge compute budget to train a DNN. They typically have megabytes to gigabytes of somewhat crappy data and need something that can be developed and deployed relatively quickly for low cost.
Platforms like Kaggle, DrivenData, Zindi, AIcrowd, CodaLab and others are running dozens-hundreds of competitions a year in total, including ones linked to top academic conferences. One interesting recent one is this one on LLM efficiency - trying to see to what extent people can fine-tune an LLM with just 1GPU and 24h: https://llm-efficiency-challenge.github.io/
Or the Makridakis series of challenges, running since the 80s, which are a great testbed for time-series models (the 6th one finished just last year): https://mofc.unic.ac.cy/the-m6-competition/
AFAIK, modern ML challenges try to combat that by moving from answer-only submissions to code submissions and putting constraints on compute.
https://www.thrillist.com/entertainment/nation/the-netflix-p...
Also, they definitely used code from the first two competitions in the company.
"The first year of the competition, in 2006 and 2007, the technical advancements that were made by us and the other big teams I think were really significant in the field of recommender systems," says Volinsky. He thinks the idea that Netflix didn't use the results is a misconception. "We gave them our code. They definitely did implement and use those breakthroughs that we made in the first year."
For more that are interested , I can speak about it to the best of my ability. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/author/38180399800 ( that is some things about him) Essentially he would say that they initially shelved it over time as it was not needed, but they definitely used. Belanger tragically died November 18, 2022.
User ratings are fraught. The things a user actually does are more likely to be sincere. And it doesn't put any burden on the user. I have a feeling that even the simple thumb up/down means less than whether you actually finished watching the movie.
Sounds like everybody is winning other than me. Though given I cancelled and never looked back, maybe I am winning afterall.
The title to me sounds analogous to 'I didn't use that piece of code I wrote on the weekend (but I probably learned something from it)'.
If it were 10m, maybe relevant? But hardly to their bottom line.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/NFLX/netflix/reven... ...
Most companies that size (in evolving industries at least) should have 10-100 of those moonshot/R&D/marketing projects on the go. And I'm speaking to the choir here - exactly: surely most readers of thenextweb would be thinking the same here.
I don't want to know what's popular, I want to know what other people who share my past tastes are watching currently. Doesn't matter the size of my niche, why can't i find my niche, and be shown my cohort?
I just don't feel it's an impossible task to find, for example, a set of people who enjoyed Deadpool 1, Guardians of the Galaxy 1, but think the entire rest of the superhero cavalcade is utter garbage. ok, I'll allow Kickass also, and a grudging nod to Iron Man 1. (as an illustration, I just searched to look up the name of Iron Man, I could only remember Tony Stark. Top search results were "a fictional character", "played by R Downey Jr", "Marvel cinematic universe"... You see, none of those is Iron Man 1. I don't care about the horde of people who care about a supposed cinematic universe. We (in my cohort) liked the first one, and what we liked about it wasn't continued in the 2nd.
How about preferences that show I like a few early films with say George Clooney, but after that, no. Julia Roberts, same. I remember when Meryl Streep was a new actress, but now she's a red flag. I'm sure my tastes aren't shared by everybody, but I'm also sure, since I can articulate reasons, there must be others who in general share them, people who are willing to watch what's new and trendy in some way, but then not beat the dead horse. Oh, Spielberg, a few winners, but overall "nope nope nope", the way he aims at sentiment is a zero for me.
I originally had this idea back in the 80's when Consumer Reports had their monthly mail-in bingo card for what current movies you liked, then they would tabulate what was popular among their readers. That type of "best of" list is entirely missing co-variance, which I think is where I live.
Part of why it's so effective are for the reasons you outline, in that it can find items that you'll probably like, that aren't similar to items you already like, based on people that have similar tastes to you.
You triggered me to remember additional elements of my idea. the 80's saw the arrival of the CD-ROM, and I thought "Consumer Reports can't publish a detailed chart of everybody's taste, but I'll bet their movie voting database would fit on a CD-ROM, and a piece of statistical software could figure out what movies each person would like." But I didn't think people would pay enough for the service to get a new CD-ROM in the mail every month, and if it didn't stay up to date with the latest VHS releases :) it wouldn't be useful, and Consumers Union was such a ... purist/hairshirt type organization how could anybody even work with them.
The same general methods are also relevant to other matching problems, like search.
Disclosure: Work at Google, but not on anything related to this course.
> But once we overcame those challenges, we put the two algorithms into production, where they are still used as part of our recommendation engine.
There are about 21 LatAm countries.
The advance of recsys is in big part thanks for Netflix because it attracted a lot of people to the field, all companies started developing inhouse RecSys just like today you hear about inhouse LLM/chatgpt wrappers etc
I am always sceptical of these claims. Today algorithms have become ai models. Sorting algorithms are recommendation engines.
I tried to explain that you can't read minds; you can't account for the fact that I'm going to watch a movie that I saw in a random internet post that I didn't know that I liked...
Which was my real beef with the contest: Computers can't read minds. They can't analyze the content of the movie and have the emotional experience that a person can.
https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2023/may/01/ai-makes-...
No but you can read minds by proxy, via ratings, which is what the dataset consisted of.
They probably could. Apple photos is already capable of judging the quality of your photos, so it’s not too much of a leap to think that a model could be trained to recognise good from bad movies.
On the other hand there are far fewer movies than photos for training on so it’s hard to say how good the results would be.
You all have witnessed it, some of you may have even tried to stem the tide of horrific spending, some of you are to blame.
Go to the billing page of whatever third-party thing you use and just recoil in horror how much you spend.
Does Netflix have such content nowadays? I really wouldn't know. They optimize the experience for binge-watching and nothing else. I wish so badly that they'd do a letterboxd thing and allow for curation of their catalog but it all goes back to the ephemeral nature of their content and how they have to hide that fact.
They care so little about that approach now it's no wonder they never used this algorithm.
Netflix sold a lot of people a lie, their customers, their employees and their investors. We jumped on board thinking Netflix was serious about the living room experience in a wholistic way.
Once every other media company could do what they were doing they realized they have to become an entertainment company. It was shrewd foresight on their end, otherwise they wouldnt exist anymore. Unless they tried to license out their infrastructure or something
Strategically, Netflix is beholden to its manufacturing partners and never had a wholistic story for the living room the way they claimed to want because they never had control. They never had control because they didn't come up with a compelling prototype. This would necessarily include gaming and other content.
[1]: https://papers.freebsd.org/2021/eurobsdcon/gallatin-netflix-...
[2]: https://papers.freebsd.org/2022/eurobsdcon/gallatin-the_othe...
[3]: https://netflixtechblog.com/mezzfs-mounting-object-storage-i...
Holistic. It derives from the Greek Holos meaning whole, while ‘whole’ ironically derives from Germanic for ‘hail’ i.e. ‘well’ or healthy.
I was never convinced. Partly because I wanted to see the actual number of stars when choosing a video, and partly because their motives at the time were highly suspect (one of their own produced videos was getting bombed with 1-star reviews, IIRC).
I have to disagree. I don't love the Netflix interface, but Max is truly terrible. It is egregiously slow and it's difficult to locate the things that I want. And when the thing I want happens to be highlighted at the top of the homepage, it's always a dumb "just play more of this" instead of a link to the show info page, which almost always plays the end credits of the last episode I watched, and it takes 60 seconds to load that, then another 60 seconds to start the correct episode when I find it. If I get a take-out burrito and sit down to watch TV and eat it, I always think to myself "I wonder if I can actually find and start a show before I finish my entire burrito," which is an exaggeration, but not by a lot. All the accumulated UI "wait for something to load" moments add up to minutes. Netflix, on the other hand, is almost always more or less instantaneous (2-3 seconds maximum per UI navigation, 5ish seconds to start streaming).
Also, constant price increases and laying off large numbers of employees...
At least up until 2015 (last published paper that I'm aware of) this actually is how they optimised their recommender:
"However, we have observed that improving engagement—the time that our members spend viewing Netflix content—is strongly correlated with improving retention. Accordingly, we design randomized, controlled experiments, often called A/B tests, to compare the medium-term engagement with Netflix along with member cancellation rates across algorithm variants"
Gomez-Uribe, C. A., & Hunt, N. (2015). The netflix recommender system: Algorithms, business value, and innovation. ACM Transactions on Management Information Systems (TMIS), 6(4), 1-19.
It's probably a reasonable approach and has clearly been successful
Worse yet it seems to think I want to watch the three things that are most popular on the platform.
This indicates that the Netflix UX business is being significantly mismanaged.
I find its algo absolutely rubbish and most of my initial excitement to go watch something with my wife on the couch instantly fades as soon as we face the doomscrolling of finding content to watch.
It's like zapping but worse
Since I added a userscript to see IMDB ratings directly next to the netflix shows it's way easier to find something promising.
I always wonder if people who say this either have very particular interests, or are trying to find specific tv shows/movies and not finding them on Netflix. If you are not set on a particular thing, it seems to me that there is a ton of great content.
That means if their friends are watching stuff on Amazon Prime, then netflix can never meet their needs.
It's got Apple TV beat, I guess, but I wouldn't call that a major streaming service.
[EDIT] Oh and I'd say it's overall worse than D+, for that matter, even though that's basically an umbrella for a few niche services. Like if I could only have one of those two, I'd take D+. And D+ kinda sucks.
If netflix wants to lean in even further, they should pick up rights to produce additional seasons of most of the stuff Warner Brothers Discovery cancelled last year (they're the parent company of HBO and have subpar management, even by Hollywood exec standards).
I have a weird take on this.
Before I started working on my startup, I had a lot of time to watch and even make movies. I typically would watch about ~50-100 films a year. When I was younger, it was even more. I was voracious.
I tend to like indie and art house films, but I'll also enjoy popular fare. I'm not a snob. As long as the choices of the writers, directors, actors, and editors make sense, I'm typically able to assign a rating and slot the film into some kind of tier list.
But I'm always left unsated by the decision envelope.
The film will make its choices, but I always find myself wanting to go in other directions. Sometimes wildly different ones. I feel more like an active participant, critic, or perhaps even script doctor or producer.
When the story beats of a film change, my imagination keeps predicting outcomes along various trajectories. Sometimes I'm a perfect predictor. In these instances, films tend to be full of lazy tropes and are completely unsatisfying. Other times, my predictor is way off. If the dissonance is huge, sometimes I'm also left upset by the departure from expectations. It depends on whether the rest of the work makes sense as a whole.
I can't turn this off. It's always running.
I only see a handful of films a decade that will sit with me for days or weeks. The themes rhyme and have an ethereal logic that transcends me. These are the films that play my predictor like an instrument. Their choices are better than mine. Surprisingly and delightfully so. They reach my soul and change who I am as a person. These are films that I wouldn't change in the slightest. That I wish I could forget and watch again, and again, and again with fresh eyes.
I enjoy film, but I can't stop my overactive analysis. As I've gotten older, this attitude has only deepened. It makes it hard to call watching film entirely passive or enjoyable.
I enjoy the activity, but not always the film. The feelings are fleeting, and I'm left wanting for more.
Except occasionally. And I cherish those.
What are a handful of recent films that were noteworthy by your criteria?
And a handful of all-time noteworthies?
Watching time-filler crowd-pleaser nothing-to-say movies that seem to be made simply because the world is full of non-discriminating consumers and someone needs to take their money ... leaves me feeling pretty bored.
There's a time and a place for it all, I guess. But life (free time) is too short (scarce) to waste.
What sort of thing are you into? What are some movies you really like? Would help to tune any suggestions.
[edit] Meanwhile, some shots in the dark:
- The Green Knight — Based on the story by the Pearl Poet and expanded and adapted with a combo of other Arthurian tales and the filmmakers’ own twists. Basically, a lonely, somewhat psychedelic (but not in a bright-kaleidoscope-colors sort of way…) dark fantasy journey with tasteful hints of dozens of influences adorning it. A great Winter watch, too. Benefits from the best screen and system you can get in front of.
- You Won’t Be Alone — Broadly horror-themed but not in a Hollywood monster movie or Halloween popcorn muncher sort of way. It’s not really aiming for scares, exactly. Comically similar themes and message to a major widely-lauded off-kilter film from the same year (2022) but approached from a very different angle. Macedonian language. You may worry in the first twenty minutes that you’ve stumbled into the Easter European Indie Movie Doldrums of Mediocrity, but persevere, it starts to come together and develop purpose before long. Hard recommend for fans of The Witch who liked the “historically accurate” grossness & mythology of that film, but it’s not as firmly in the horror genre as that was.
On the lighter (and not quite as good, good) side:
- The Kid Detective — Semi-comedy. Imagine the stereotypical middle-aged guy who’s never topped their time as a high school quarterback. Now imagine if instead of playing football, they were a kid detective (you know, Nancy Drew sorts of stuff) and that is the thing they peaked at in high school. That’s our protagonist. Film sags at times but the premise is so fun and relatively-well-used that it’s still a good time, if that blurb above piqued your interest at all. Certainly a sort of noir, with all that entails, so if Your Hero getting his ass kicked more than doing the ass kicking bothers you, avoid (as with lots of noirs)
- Spontaneous — Dark high school romance-comedy. Also, people, all over the place, have started occasionally suddenly exploding for no evident reason. That’s the movie’s deal. It took me embarrassingly long to realize what it was really about (or, at least a major one of the things it’s about) and it punched me in the damn gut when I did. Oof.
I reliably enjoy films from Miranda July and Greta Gerwig. I think I'd enjoy Wes Anderson more if he was a bit less campy (but I get it, that's a big part of the point, so I guess I appreciate the other things he's good at).
Thank you for the suggestions -- I have never heard of any of them. They are far afield from my known preferences, but sound like the better versions of the options that Netflix wants me to watch, which is great! I will check them out.
- Nomadland — Lonely older woman clinging to the bottom rung of the economic ladder is pushed into van-living and finds community. Basically positive-but-bittersweet vibes by the end, and with a similar strong reliance on setting and mood to something like a Wes Anderson work (though without the precise placement of every single element in frame), but definitely not "cute" like his are, and not about comfortable rich people. Includes many real people living in vans, blurring the lines between fiction and reality (and deftly almost-entirely avoiding the usual problems that come with including non-actors in a film). Lots of great outdoor shooting and lighting work.
- Red Rocket — Struggling, middle-aged male porn star moves back to his small, blue-collar hometown in Texas. We learn about his still-evolving relationships with the people he left behind when he moved away to LA, and see him make some... choices. Probably the most into archetype and symbolism of anything I've listed except maybe The Green Knight. By the end, is very much about its protagonist as a kind of daemon, if you will, of a part of the American experience and spirit (and also a representation of one or more sorts of real person with whom one may be familiar from one's own experience). Great attention to detail for a certain kind of ordinary setting, in the way that Anderson or maybe Miyazaki pay attention to that kind of everyday detail, but employed to obtain perfectly-trashy environs that aren't at all pretty but are also entirely true-to-life, not caricature. If you've spent time in such places, the clutter, the way trash has accumulated, the way in which the miniblinds are broken just so, and the way the people exist in that space, will feel very familiar.
- Eighth Grade — Bo Burnham's only film (I think?). Akin to something like Gerwig's Lady Bird, I'd say, but less heightened and more "real".
With more time to dredge my memory, I also remember really enjoying Amelie and a most (not all) of Hal Hartley's movies.
So I guess that boils down to "independent movies with interesting characters and/or dialogue"?
Thank you again!
I don't stream a lot. Every few months I'll just want to zonk out for a while though. The past few times I've wanted to watch "nothing in particular" it's gone something like:
1. Sit down, open Netflix.
2. Scroll through all the categories and suggestions on the home screen, finding nothing interesting.
3. Search for a few things I thought of while scrolling. Search returns things I can watch instead since what I searched for isn't on Netflix.
3. Open Prime Video, see something I'm interested in suggested pretty quickly, pay $ to rent or buy.
I'm not one of the people complaining, but I've definitely seen my self scrolling a lot with Netflix recommending I re-watch a lot of the stuff I liked before only to end up giving up and switching to something else.
I am not sure how that data would be gathered, maybe via an intermediary player like Plex, Roku, Android TV, etc..?
Once they went heavy into content creation, this was expected and optimal for them, unfortunately.
How does their licensing structure work? Do they pay a flat fee for unlimited license to some/all shows? Or do they pay a base + a micropayment for each view? If the latter, then of course they dont want to optimize for you, they want to find the optimization point between maximizing subscriptions vs cheapest content. Similar to the recurring conversations about the economics of buffets: you want a lot of people to come in, but not the ones who just eat all the expensive things.
For the price of $1mil (plus a bit of engineering time) they got a list of talented engineers who have too much time, and also everyone now knows that they are the company with the really challenging problems. Forward the list to recruiting, and you got a bunch of new hires, much more effective than paying for job ads.
Spotify is the same with whatever crappy playlists and podcasts they want you to listen.
YouTube doesn't even bother showing results that you searched past the 10 or so results, it's "content you might like" which is crap and unrelated to anything I've watched, 100% of the time.
Netflix, especially Netflix back then, is highly reliant upon in-product recommendations because if people sought out specific pieces of media they’d often find that Netflix didn’t have it.
I think it really falls down on Netflix because it doesn't have anything good to recommend to you 90% of the time. Doesn't matter how good your recommendation algorithm is if your catalogue is 90% dross and the user has already watched the remaining 10%.
My question is: how do you discover new things that you might like even more?
I think about this more in terms of music than movies, but maybe it applies to many media.
Some people will listen to Aerosmith and The Eagles until they die. They do not need media discovery. But how do new artists find an audience and how does that audience find new artists?
Recommendation engines suck, but is this a failure of current implementations, or something more fundamental?
about-to-die
off-hype
(my own opinion of course)