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

How useful was the Netflix Prize challenge for Netflix?

quora.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 205 posts

Re: How useful was the Netflix Prize challenge for Netflix?

#31

Post by rrrrrrrrrrrryan »

setr wrote: post #28
Supermancho wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At the time, Netflix wasn't super high-tech I will admit that it was interesting to see what algorithms were poised to be cutting edge in media recommendation. The result was rather disappointing to me. Netflix STILL isn't that exciting from anything but a compensation standpoint. The problems at netflix are about programming, while the technical challenges are droll at best.

IMO the recommendations are no good because they fundamentally take the wrong approach — rather than ask the user what they like, they try to guess what you like based on usage (which really doesn't correlate well — I watch a lot of garbage because I can’t find things I like, and I don’t have anything better to do.) And they don’t ask because users don’t provide useful answers. But users don’t provide useful answers,…

Who's more likely to keep renewing their subscription? The person who uses Netflix to watch a ton of trash that they think is "just ok," or the person who merely watches 1 or 2 things per month that they actually enjoy?

I'm certain Netflix ran the numbers, and determined that a high-usage customer is the most valuable.

Re: How useful was the Netflix Prize challenge for Netflix?

#34

Post by tomnipotent »

IncRnd wrote: post #29

I was a solver on a different team for the netflix challenge. Our team didn't win the grand prize. I would have expected that a blog post would discuss how this was structured. Netflix contracted with innocentive.com, which is a website for solvers, and contracting to that website expanded Netflix's reach to a greater available pool of solvers. As far as I recall, all the allowed solvers for the netflix challenge _ha…

I don't remember InnoCentive being involved with the Netflix Prize in any official capacity, but I do remember the PR storm they launched after the prize was awarded to make sure they were mentioned in news articles about it.

Re: How useful was the Netflix Prize challenge for Netflix?

#35

Post by ausumm »

ausumm wrote: post #32

https://ausum.io/s/lnz2iFXJAJ11QJYUYOQBoWYHW8ThYENN5o8Ms7Ajq... - summarized this article into an audio clip: 1 minute and 40 seconds. Listen or download the audio file.

And the other article linked in the thread (you could download and listen to this post whenever you'd like.)

Chapter 1. Introduction to Collective Intelligence - OReilly https://ausum.io/s/lPSp1k9-y11o1rjXI7E8EvBx4tOe5bxVjKzxtbJ2K...

Re: How useful was the Netflix Prize challenge for Netflix?

#36

Post by Ozzie_osman »

tyingq wrote: post #10
alberth wrote: post #2

What’s odd is that the person responding in Quora who’s speaking as if he has authority on this matter started at Netflix in 2011, 2 years after the contest ended. The contest started in 2006 and was awarded in 2009. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netflix_Prize

He was the head of the area (Research/Engineering) that managed the recommendation engine. Part of that would be understanding the history.

He's also a reputable source on Machine Learning in general and pretty well known in the community (I worked under him).

Re: How useful was the Netflix Prize challenge for Netflix?

#37

Post by IncRnd »

tomnipotent wrote: post #34
IncRnd wrote: post #29

I was a solver on a different team for the netflix challenge. Our team didn't win the grand prize. I would have expected that a blog post would discuss how this was structured. Netflix contracted with innocentive.com, which is a website for solvers, and contracting to that website expanded Netflix's reach to a greater available pool of solvers. As far as I recall, all the allowed solvers for the netflix challenge _ha…

I don't remember InnoCentive being involved with the Netflix Prize in any official capacity, but I do remember the PR storm they launched after the prize was awarded to make sure they were mentioned in news articles about it.

I signed up for the challenge, through innocentive, in July of 2008.

It's entirely possible that as a new solver at the time I fell for innocentive's PR. The netflix challenge was actually the first I ever signed-up to work.

Re: How useful was the Netflix Prize challenge for Netflix?

#38

Post by redis_mlc »

I did some work for the Recommendation team (the oversized checks were still arrayed along the wall when I was there.)

The later winning entries were too compute-intensive to implement, or not enough of an advantage over the existing engine to justify more compute.

So I would say it was a real competition, not just PR, even though a particular solution wasn't used.

(Factoid: It was the the last team to start the migration to Cassandra.)

Re: How useful was the Netflix Prize challenge for Netflix?

#39

Post by albertsondev »

Elidrake24 wrote: post #15
prepend wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Netflix doesn’t have enough content to do this. They have their own originals and just a thin layer of other stuff. So I think any truly personalized content channel would get exhausted quickly. What I’d like to have is just a channel of curated or semi curated movie content that I can leave running or forward through to watch. I recently stayed in a hotel with 6 channels of hbo. It’s kind of refreshing to ha…

…Huh? Netflix has more originals at this point then HBO has across their entire library. That’s ignoring the licensed content Netflix also pays for. I can appreciate that you may not like said content, but they certainly aren’t lacking.

It isn't, however, ignoring the exclusively licensed content Netflix also pays for, which the bulk of their "originals" are.

Re: How useful was the Netflix Prize challenge for Netflix?

#40

Post by makeitdouble »

rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote: post #31
setr wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO the recommendations are no good because they fundamentally take the wrong approach — rather than ask the user what they like, they try to guess what you like based on usage (which really doesn't correlate well — I watch a lot of garbage because I can’t find things I like, and I don’t have anything better to do.) And they don’t ask because users don’t provide useful answers. But users don’t provide useful answers,…

Who's more likely to keep renewing their subscription? The person who uses Netflix to watch a ton of trash that they think is "just ok," or the person who merely watches 1 or 2 things per month that they actually enjoy? I'm certain Netflix ran the numbers, and determined that a high-usage customer is the most valuable.

It's interesting how many corporations don't actually "run the numbers" on what we think are important issues. Basically, internal focus and what the rest of the world cares about are disjointed and corps are often blind to obvious aspects. This can be improved by strong internal diversity, but Netflix doesn't look like a bastion of that (yet?)

On "just ok" vs stuff actually enjoyable, "just ok" is fine until there is no better competitor for attention (e.g. a new smartphone game takes over the world). If they get to fit on the "actually enjoyable" scale instead, there is a better chance for people to keep their subscription, sometimes even if they end not viewing anything that month for whatever reason.

Post reply on HN