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What We Watched: A Netflix engagement report

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Re: What We Watched: A Netflix engagement report

#241

Post by hobofan »

danielscrubs wrote: post #232
nomel wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, to look at it another way, they're giving their paying customers what they want.

They are not. They removed the five star rating because they thought people lied to themselves, but in reality they just couldn’t handle the data. What they will give you is what I call the lowest common denominator of shows.

> but in reality they just couldn’t handle the data

If you mean from a "critique" standpoint then no. If you meant from a "data wrangling standpoint then yes, as binary like/dislike data is just a lot easier to work with for recommendation algorithms.

There are many good reasons to move from a five star rating system to a binary rating system, and yeah, I think many of those fall into the "people lied to themselves" category:

- People tend to note use five or ten star systems on a continuous scale with certain points on the scale being biased

- People tend to go into "movie critic"-mode when they see a 5/10-star scale, as those are usually used on sites like IMDB. That drives them to try and rate the movie "objectively" and in accordance with an intellectual image they want to portray, rather than what they actually like/dislike consuming and spend their time watching

- Netflix also displayed the ratings as 5-star "adjusted ratings for the viewer", which already took your preferences into account. Not a single person I've talked to back then was aware of that, so everyone tried to do the same mental gymnastics they do when trying to project global IMDB ratings to their personal preferences. Moving to a "XX% match for you" together with the like/dislikes is something that people understand a lot better

All-in-all, I don't think the rating system really has been an issue in the recent years. The catalog has been a much bigger issue during that time. I'm pretty sure that Netflix's rating and recommendation system has been good enough that it has served me everything that I'd like to watch on their platform and now I'm out of content.

Re: What We Watched: A Netflix engagement report

#242

Post by globular-toast »

muzani wrote: post #218
mensetmanusman wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We could be so much wealthier!!

Sometimes I sit and think about how one of the highest paying companies in the world sells unproductivity as a service. There's free options for entertainment like YouTube too.

There's nothing wrong with being unproductive. We should totally rest and enjoy life once we've covered our needs for the day. This thing about productivity being a goal of society is stupid. Who says being productive leads to happiness?

I actually like to be productive, and I suspect you do too. But if people don't, that's fine too. I do wonder if we might be addicted to productivity, though.

Re: What We Watched: A Netflix engagement report

#243

Post by wtallis »

jncfhnb wrote: post #115
pcurve wrote: post #110

I love that they released the report in Excel format. They collectively saved millions of man hours across the world from doing useless data scraping and reformatting.

I think you’re off by several orders of magnitude there

I think it's the same kind of math the studios use to estimate the damages from piracy: ignoring that people will simply give up when not presented with a reasonable alternative. How much money would a movie bring in if everyone who cared enough to watch it illegally for free had instead chosen to see it in theaters or buy the blu-ray? How many man-hours would be spent crunching this data if Netflix hadn't dumped it in a convenient format but everyone interested in the data was willing to process it the hard way?

Re: What We Watched: A Netflix engagement report

#244

Post by watwut »

rr808 wrote: post #187
thebradbain wrote: post #118

For anyone else wondering “why they’ve decided to do this”— This is an outcome of the WGA strike negotiations. Now writers (and actors, and anyone else) can use this information to better negotiate their worth with studios, rather than it being 1-sided. All other streaming services should be following suit soon. https://www.wgacontract2023.org/the-campaign/what-we-won > Streaming data transparency: Companies agree to…

Who needs new content? Kinda sad to see the most popular shows being Friends, Suits, Breaking Bad, the walking dead etc.

I discovered Breaking Bad exists this year. So, likely, whole bunch of people discovered it along with me.

Nothing sad about it, it is really good show.

Re: What We Watched: A Netflix engagement report

#245

Post by bryanrasmussen »

ycombinete wrote: post #220
nine_k wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(1) I remember the times when Breaking Bad was new content. (2) Once somebody asked Quentin Taranto in an interview: "So, you haven't managed to produce anything better than Pulp Fiction by now, how come?" Tarantion answered: "You mean, somebody has managed to?" Some things just end up being exceptionally good, and you can't produce another comparable specimen on demand.

I wonder if that Tarantino response is apocryphal. I have heard the same interaction credited to Joseph Heller about Catch-22 : At appearances to publicise his later books, readers would often bluntly tell him that he hadn’t written anything as good as Catch-22, to which the reply, after a growly laugh, was: “No. But nor has anyone else.” - https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/jun/20/george-clooney...

Or perhaps when you create something exceptionally good you end up coming up with this response to the no doubt often repeated question of why you haven't been able to top it, or reading about someone else with the same problem and thinking "hey, that's good - think I'll use it"

Re: What We Watched: A Netflix engagement report

#246

Post by watwut »

wmil wrote: post #163
layoric wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Big Bang Theory 420,400,000 That is just depressing IMO.. I don't understand the appeal to that show..

It's a warm show about people who care about each other where the drama comes from social misunderstandings. The initial pilot featured a more conniving Penny played by a different actress. The focus group feedback was "Someone keep that mean girl away from those sweet boys". Think of it as a show for moms / grandmothers / aunts of nerdy men. They want to see them get up so some shenanigans but generally be OK. It's…

> It's a warm show about people who care about each other

I like that show, but no, it is not warm show about caring. It is fun show about mutual abuse. Like I said, fun and all, but in kinda cruel way.

Re: What We Watched: A Netflix engagement report

#247

Post by bozhark »

nilsherzig wrote: post #238
getcrunk wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Night agent came out this year and is 10 episodes. I didn’t check but assuming it’s 1hr/ep that’s 80million viewers. Wow Ps. Checking a popular torrent site and roughly adding up the download count for all the season rips and adding a representative number from some of the individual episodes. Then multiplying that by 10 because there are other public torrent sites and many private ones we get 60k x 10. Even if you d…

Basically no one in my age group (gen z) knows what Torrents are let alone is able to use them. Most piracy happens via sites like s dot to.

Gen Z fallen to the fallacy that you won’t own anything, smh

Re: What We Watched: A Netflix engagement report

#248

Post by bryanrasmussen »

getcrunk wrote: post #199
teej wrote: post #35

I noticed that the watchtime of `You` was split half-and-half between the new season 4 and the prior seasons 1-3. I was curious about the total results by show, including all seasons. Here's the top 25: TITLE TOTAL HRS WATCHED ----- ----------------- Ginny & Georgia 967,200,000 The Night Agent 812,100,000 You 766,300,000 Outer Banks 740,400,000 The Walking Dead 738,600,000 The Glory 622,800,000 La Reina del Sur 616,8…

Night agent came out this year and is 10 episodes. I didn’t check but assuming it’s 1hr/ep that’s 80million viewers. Wow Ps. Checking a popular torrent site and roughly adding up the download count for all the season rips and adding a representative number from some of the individual episodes. Then multiplying that by 10 because there are other public torrent sites and many private ones we get 60k x 10. Even if you d…

The Night Agent was not good enough that you would want to go through the effort to pirate it, but it was slightly good enough to watch if you had nothing else to do after a hard day of work. I had no idea it was that successful, now I feel sort of bad for contributing to it.

Re: What We Watched: A Netflix engagement report

#249

Post by nindalf »

ycombinete wrote: post #220
nine_k wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(1) I remember the times when Breaking Bad was new content. (2) Once somebody asked Quentin Taranto in an interview: "So, you haven't managed to produce anything better than Pulp Fiction by now, how come?" Tarantion answered: "You mean, somebody has managed to?" Some things just end up being exceptionally good, and you can't produce another comparable specimen on demand.

I wonder if that Tarantino response is apocryphal. I have heard the same interaction credited to Joseph Heller about Catch-22 : At appearances to publicise his later books, readers would often bluntly tell him that he hadn’t written anything as good as Catch-22, to which the reply, after a growly laugh, was: “No. But nor has anyone else.” - https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/jun/20/george-clooney...

They asked him why he hadn’t been able to come up with a better joke to address that question. He replied with a laugh “no, but nor has anyone else”.

Re: What We Watched: A Netflix engagement report

#250

Post by globular-toast »

jbc1 wrote: post #206
j7ake wrote: post #161

Read the top 10 list, and I haven’t heard of any of these shows. Is the world segregating such that there are fewer shared activities in a community to talk about? Growing up 30 years ago, everybody knew the top 5 TV shows even if you didn’t watch them: they were the topic of conversations or at least listed in thr “TV guides”

Paul Graham has an essay that touches on that http://www.paulgraham.com/re.html >And not only did everyone get the same thing, they got it at the same time. It's difficult to imagine now, but every night tens of millions of families would sit down together in front of their TV set watching the same show, at the same time, as their next door neighbors. What happens now with the Super Bowl used to happen every night. W…

A really big part of the bond between my girlfriend and me is that we are almost the same age, from similar families and had all the same TV and radio growing up. We actually have very different musical tastes, but we both know and like all the familiar stuff from the 90s.

I've had many relationships where we've been very different ages or grew up in different countries and it's surprising how much is missing from such a relationship. I could always tell this by observing former partners relish talking about this stuff on the occasion they meet someone in their own group. I, of course, couldn't join in.

The fragmentation started in the 90s, though. Already there were kids who had watched the football last night. Or they'd seen something American, like a film. These were available on subscription only TV (which I thought only rich families had, but, in fact, it was mostly families bad with money). More and more stuff went to paid TV, like cricket and boxing, that used to be available to all. Then you had kids who had inexplicably seen all of something like South Park despite it not being on any public channel. It steadily grew from there to the extent I wouldn't even be surprised if kids from non-football families don't know what Manchester United is, for example.

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