Apparently, they're going to give all of the code out, which is good to hear. I'm proud of the machine learning community for that. As for Netflix, it's difficult for me to believe this is really about research and not about increasing their profitability.
I could be way off. Maybe $1 million over the course of 2+ years is a heck of a lot of money for a team of developers (selected from 35,000 teams), which will be used to generate more profit for NetFlix. Who knows. I'm glad that so far over 2 years, $100k was given out. That's good to see.