Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Netflix's Viewing Data: How We Know Where You Are in House of Cards

techblog.netflix.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 49 posts

Re: Netflix's Viewing Data: How We Know Where You Are in House of Cards

#11

Post by neumann »

These posts depress me. They are always showing off some cool algorithm that is oh so clever, and yet Netflix recommendations are just the same films over and over again. Amazon instant somehow nailed it - I keep finding new shows/films that are actually well aligned with my viewing history and rating. Maybe their offerings are more tailored to my tastes?

As a tangent, I've been meaning to start a discussion on how utterly unusable I find the Netflix interface. Maybe it is because I only just signed up and haven't been exposed to its iterations, but I am pretty sure I spent 10 minutes trying to figure out how to watch a particular episode. Likewise the personalised experience page sometimes disappears. Again, not wanting to compare too much, but for a late start to the game, Amazon I found pretty intuitive.

Re: Netflix's Viewing Data: How We Know Where You Are in House of Cards

#12

Post by kbenson »

erehweb wrote: post #4
falcolas wrote: post #3

I know it's their data. I know I'm playing in their sandbox. I know how much data a couple of terabyte hard drives can really hold. But these kinds of revelations are still a solid 10 on the creepy scale nonetheless.

A 10 is overstating it, I think. Netflix gives reasons for why they collect the data (recommendations, continue watching cross-device, ...). Given the Netflix prize, I don't think we can be too surprised that they're collecting data for recommendations (or figuring out whether licensing deals are worth it). I'd give it a weak 2 on the creepy scale.

I agree. All the little value-added features they support that makes them different from competitors requires tracking more information. Being more useful with the same inventory is a matter of helping people utilize that inventory more effectively. That means knowing more about your customer. This isn't new with the internet, businesses have always tried to know and understand their customers. The internet just makes it easier to know more about individual customers, instead of broad categories.

Re: Netflix's Viewing Data: How We Know Where You Are in House of Cards

#13

Post by nilkn »

saberworks wrote: post #2

I wish they would note which movies they've shown to me and I've chosen not to watch 1 bazillion times. Then stop showing them to me. For recommendations, isn't knowing what I chose not to watch as important as knowing what I've actually watched?

This is a classic example of focusing on fancy, clever things and forgetting about the obvious and simple wins.

Re: Netflix's Viewing Data: How We Know Where You Are in House of Cards

#14

Post by MichaelGG »

So there's 2 billion hours watched per month, but a few billion "view" events per day? So let's round and say 100B view events a month, so 50 events per hour viewed? I wonder if this is because people preview a ton of stuff they don't watch, or are they recording pauses, or ... ?

Re: Netflix's Viewing Data: How We Know Where You Are in House of Cards

#15

Post by jhgg »

tempestn wrote: post #9

That eyeball in the circle of dots would make a good logo for an NSA project. They should borrow it.

That's the logo for Apache Cassandra https://cassandra.apache.org/ which is a highly available, fault-tolerant database designed for write intensive workloads.

The NSA probably uses it.

Re: Netflix's Viewing Data: How We Know Where You Are in House of Cards

#16

Post by MichaelGG »

saberworks wrote: post #2

I wish they would note which movies they've shown to me and I've chosen not to watch 1 bazillion times. Then stop showing them to me. For recommendations, isn't knowing what I chose not to watch as important as knowing what I've actually watched?

I wonder if this is intentional? As in, if they can delay a user an average of X minutes per viewing session, they save? Or perhaps more realistically, have they determined that the terrible recommendations do work for some metric?

It's not like they can be blind to the problem, right? Or perhaps they are lacking content for people like us?

Re: Netflix's Viewing Data: How We Know Where You Are in House of Cards

#18

Post by icehawk219 »

MichaelGG wrote: post #16
saberworks wrote: post #2

I wish they would note which movies they've shown to me and I've chosen not to watch 1 bazillion times. Then stop showing them to me. For recommendations, isn't knowing what I chose not to watch as important as knowing what I've actually watched?

I wonder if this is intentional? As in, if they can delay a user an average of X minutes per viewing session, they save? Or perhaps more realistically, have they determined that the terrible recommendations do work for some metric? It's not like they can be blind to the problem, right? Or perhaps they are lacking content for people like us?

While this makes a good narrative (and as someone who is fed up with laying down to get comfortable just to have to get up 3 minutes later to confirm I'm still watching Futurama again it's easy to imagine), I suspect it's less sinister than this. If anything I'd suspect it's more likely that they're trying to boost, or give a final effort, towards certain things. I'm sure viewing numbers play into their contract negotiations so if something isn't doing well it's an indication they need to ditch it or an indication they over-paid. So I wonder if instead of it being them trying to delay you watching something it's just them really hoping you'll eventually decide to watch it.

Re: Netflix's Viewing Data: How We Know Where You Are in House of Cards

#20

Post by lalos »

neumann wrote: post #11

These posts depress me. They are always showing off some cool algorithm that is oh so clever, and yet Netflix recommendations are just the same films over and over again. Amazon instant somehow nailed it - I keep finding new shows/films that are actually well aligned with my viewing history and rating. Maybe their offerings are more tailored to my tastes? As a tangent, I've been meaning to start a discussion on how u…

I have a theory that it is on purpose, they want the home screen to be filled with well-known movies and if you only have a handful of them at any given time it shows the same ones all over the place. Instead of seeing random not so popular movies and thinking of stop using the service because of few "good and popular" movies.
Post reply on HN