In other news, Pandora is built on human input, among other things. The Music Genome Project.
Netflix’s Secret Special Algorithm Is a Human
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Re: Netflix’s Secret Special Algorithm Is a Human
#22> featuring the television star Melissa Raunch Whoa there! It's Rauch. Kind of a Freudian slip there, considering the actress is being named in relation to a sex scene.
Here's another:
> Television studios have Nielson ratings
It's "Nielsen".
Re: Netflix’s Secret Special Algorithm Is a Human
#23Hollywood Video's corporate office had a guy, one guy whose job it was to just watch movies. He'd watch them, make sure it was categorized properly, then create associations with other movies that "you might like" if you like this movie, and vice versa. All kept in a spreadsheet that we later plugged in. We also thought there should be an algorithm, but he was pretty dang good at what he did.
This reminds me of Derek Sivers' album recommendations for CD Baby:
Basically Sivers just listened to every album and did the same thing, and when he couldn't get to all of them he hired someone to do it full time.
How many hours of new programming do they add a day? How many people would it take?
Re: Netflix’s Secret Special Algorithm Is a Human
#24I see how netflix's dataset helps them produce an addictive serialized drama like House of Cards. There are many examples to learn from, and the shows are basically built out of a formula. What I don't see is how this would help you make a critically well received documentary about Nina Simone. Sure, you might be able to predict a lot of people will stream it, but how does that make it well received at Cannes? Nothin…
The argument of the article is that Netflix's dataset doesn't really help them make decisions like what the content of their next documentary should be. It argues that what happens instead is that Netflix's programming honcho, Ted Sarandos, picks projects based on the person who's putting them together, looking for creators with a solid creative track record and an existing cult following:
> I began to sense that their biggest bets always seemed ultimately driven by faith in a particular cult creator, like David Fincher (“House of Cards”), Jenji Leslie Kohan (“Orange is the New Black”), Ricky Gervais (“Derek”), John Fusco (“Marco Polo”), or Mitchell Hurwitz (“Arrested Development”)... I do think that there is a sophisticated algorithm at work here—but I think his name is Ted Sarandos.
So take the case of the Nina Simone doc. It was directed by Liz Garbus (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liz_Garbus), whose previous films have been Sundance- and Oscar- fare for a few years now. So it could just be that Sarandos looked at her track record and decided that Garbus was an up-and-coming talent, and that mattered more than the specific content of whatever her next project was going to be. He was just betting that a Liz Garbus documentary was going to be great, no matter what story it told.
Re: Netflix’s Secret Special Algorithm Is a Human
#25In other realms, we don't call this data but intelligence . Humans will still make the decisions, but in more and more places, the decisions are more likely to be informed by data (intelligence). Consider that Netflix's data is tiny compared to the amount of data that any government must sift through. Algorithms don't make government decisions, people do. But they (hopefully) base those decisions based on intelligenc…
I am not entirely sure what you are saying here, but the way I have always understood it is: data is knowledge; the ability to apply knowledge is intelligence. Netflix has a considerable amount of data (knowledge) and its algorithms exemplify some efforts to apply that knowledge (intelligence). As it stands presently, though, humans still tend to be more intelligent than any algorithms we have created. (Generally spe…
I'm trying to reframe what Netflix does as something that is already done - we just tend to use different names for it in those other domains. What's new is that we're doing this old thing - processing massive amounts of data, extracting the relevant facts, synthesizing those facts into a coherent story, and presenting that story to decision makers - in new contexts.
In the Netflix context, what is mostly called "data" is called "intelligence" in, say, government decision making.
Re: Netflix’s Secret Special Algorithm Is a Human
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ideally, it would be a completely automated system. You don't need to understand machine learning to know that it would be better for the computer to do everything itself without human intervention
How so? If the cost of making the computer able to do everything itself is greater than the cost of an equivalent system that takes human input, then you should use the human input version every time.
Monetary cost isn't the only cost.
Re: Netflix’s Secret Special Algorithm Is a Human
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ideally, it would be a completely automated system. You don't need to understand machine learning to know that it would be better for the computer to do everything itself without human intervention
How so? If the cost of making the computer able to do everything itself is greater than the cost of an equivalent system that takes human input, then you should use the human input version every time.
Monetary cost isn't the only cost.
Also, humans are prone to error and many other inefficiencies. They get sick, quit, fluctuate in performance, require attention and care... you say "cost" like it's some easily calculable number, but it's a whole boatload of intangibles that just... disappear if the computer does it.
Re: Netflix’s Secret Special Algorithm Is a Human
#28Drive such a thing thru Amazon Turk perhaps?
Might just be the "killer app" for Turks: get paid to watch movies!
Re: Netflix’s Secret Special Algorithm Is a Human
#29What a weird strawman article. Did the author really think Netflix produced television shows in the same way that Siri suggests gas stations? Any blockbuster-finding algorithm (or any other component of this decision) is going to have false positives and require human intervention.
Re: Netflix’s Secret Special Algorithm Is a Human
#30Hollywood Video's corporate office had a guy, one guy whose job it was to just watch movies. He'd watch them, make sure it was categorized properly, then create associations with other movies that "you might like" if you like this movie, and vice versa. All kept in a spreadsheet that we later plugged in. We also thought there should be an algorithm, but he was pretty dang good at what he did.
It's simple ROI. There is not that many movies this is a task that one doesn't need to scale with computers. Hiring a guy is likely much cheaper than investing on the software. Plus I am sure there are plenty of people who would like to watch movies for their day jobs. On the other hand, I am pretty sure there is at least some degree of automated video classification at Youtube.
I think it does need to scale.
What happens when after a bus event? Someone else has to watch every film in existence? It is not enough to just watch the new films - you have to have a memory of all other films in order to make that association.