Hacker News Reader

Comment by anself | Hacker News Reader

I don’t think there’s zero demand recommendation apps, a lot of founders choose this because it’s a problem they want to solve for themselves, and there are a few success stories out there. It’s just that it’s a super-hard problem

View on HN

> It’s just that it’s a super-hard problem

I spent 2024 building an awesome TV series recommendation platform. It worked by matching you to professional critics who shared your tastes, by basically crawling Rotten Tomatoes and getting an LLM to grade the reviews out of ten. The recommendations were awesome, and having a personalized Rotten Tomatoes where you could read about and research the show using reviews by people who felt the same way as you did about stuff was freakin' cool.

However, getting people to actually sign up and use the app without a massive marketing budget was very, very difficult. The stickiness to get people to go back to it is difficult. Asking people to input their preferences in the first place is hard. People also simply didn't believe the recommendations, and wouldn't take chances on shows; the computer can recommend The Detectorists to as many people as it wants, but there's a high number of people who would love the show but will dismiss it looking at the cover image and having a quick read of the synopsis.

The recommendation part isn't super hard, the getting people to use a B2C app is super hard.

Now, if you were Netflix (or Popcorn Time), you could just show them the series directly in the app and people would come to your app to watch the series, and also get the recommendations. They'd come back more often if you had good recommendations. People just don't want standalone recommendations.

There's also the fact that more data == better recommedations.

Even if people wanted your standalone app, they're not going to sit and enter the kind of rich data a decent recommendation engine needs. It really has to be a tool that gathers data about you as a side-effect of you using it.

Well, there's "enter your Netflix username and password here"

This has severely fallen out of fashion since the 2000s, but it used to be not uncommon that when one web app wanted to do actions on your behalf on another web app, it would just take your username and password and log in as you. According to Cory Doctorow (I wasn't there) Facebook did this to MySpace.

For Netflix in particular, logging in from your server would probably trigger anti-account-sharing, but you could avoid that by making the requests you need from the user's app on their device, not from your server.

I think the industry feels like it's illegal now, but I don't think it's actually illegal? since there's no criminal intent. I don't think it's the same, legally, as when a criminal steals your login details and logs in as you. But I'm not a lawyer and this is not legal advice. But my evidence is that there are apps (e.g. POLi) that do this with bank accounts and still don't seem to be in any trouble. Even the banks don't seem to be locking it out as that would hurt the customer's relationship with the bank.

Interesting. I wonder if this is the right way though. Firstly because the RT critic score was gamified a while ago, and secondly because there's often a big gap between what the critics think and what the audience thinks. (One of the things I like to do is find movies on RT where the difference between the two is the biggest) Even if you ignore the fact that some reviews will be sponsored and not made entirely in good faith this is assuming that critics' judgment is a good signal in the first place.

I think all of this is addressed by matching you to critics who like and dislike the same shows as you like.

Still doesn't solve the problem of finding content I don't like, but it's so good, that I start liking it. This doesn't seem to happen much anymore.

I think sign up for anything is a tall order. To use a recommendation site I would need it to just start asking me questions and immediatly also start the process of visually narrowing down content suitable for me. How many ratings from me would you need to do a good rec? Is there diminishing returns after certain amount of data from the user? There should be zero barriers of entry to this kind of thing. Like quirky website you click for few minutes. You can always provide ”save your answers” button and have the sign-in flow there, although I would appreciate unique link I can bookmark more.

And this is how we ended up with tinder...

"It's a problem they want to solve for themselves", but note that they haven't tried all the alternative recommendation services and are only creating one as a last resort. They want to solve the problem, which is a different drive from wanting a recommendation app.

Now, if someone made a "Recommendation-Engine-in-a-Box", where someone who wanted to make a recommendation app for themselves would supply the content and could tweak the algorithm and the design, I could see that being successful in this market :)

> I could see that being successful in this market

I guess SaaS aimed primarily at founders makes it a meta startup? The snake is eating its tail.

What’s a recommendation app? Like, I’d like to watch this movie, can you tell me if it is streaming on anything?

Do you think we've made it to the point that a broker for streaming services would be viable? You pay a 10% premium and they connect you with the media you want to watch without you needing to maintain a monthly subscription to 15 different services.

Would probably be worth it even if just to have a consistent UI across services.

That would be nice, but I think it is just a licensing issue and the companies that hold the licenses don’t have any incentive to try and simplify things—they’d prefer we subscribe to every service and then watch, like, one show on each.

It would be interesting to see data on this. How many people subscribe to multiple streaming services, vs the opportunity to license the content to an aggregator and sell to those that miss a lot of content because, like me they don’t want multiple services. I refuse to subscribe to all the services that have the content I want to watch: Netflix, Apple, Prime, HBO Max, Discovery… the high seas become an inconvenient option at this point.

I agree (and would also like to see that sort of info if it existed). But, I’m pretty sure the same folks who were in charge of cable when it became insufferable are now in charge of streaming. So, less-annoying business models… I’m not hopeful.

> vs the opportunity to license the content to an aggregator

Isn’t this what Netflix used to be

Exactly. And the whole reason all these other services popped up is the IP holders realized they could make a lot more money with their own service vs licensing to an aggregator. I think it worked out pretty well for Disney+, because they have a huge back catalog of very popular IP. Not sure if anyone else is really making money with this new model, but they still don’t want to go back to ceding all control to Netflix.

We could go back to the olden days when everything was on Netflix instead :)

Amazon Prime Video is already this. You can subscribe to Max, Peacock, Crunchyroll, etc. from within the Prime Video app, and watch content normally exclusive to those services.

Account pooling? Sign up to a pool that distributes your account to others when not being used, in return gives access to multiple streaming platforms on demand...

I’d be shocked if that wasn’t a ToS violation for most services.

Yeah, what was Zomato if not this?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com