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

techblog.netflix.com

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

#31

Post by jaredsohn »

oxryly1 wrote: post #22
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…

The core issue for me is that of the dozen or so shows and movies I would be interested in watching, on average 0.5 are available via netflix. So I spend a lot of time searching in futility for that show or movie I half remember wanting to see. During that search netflix is trying to recommend a bunch of other things to me and I find it annoying and distracting. Also, could somebody somehow post a schedule of show/mo…

>Also, could somebody somehow post a schedule of show/movie availability?

Some websites have this information (such as http://whatsonnetflixnow.blogspot.com/)

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

#33

Post by MichaelGG »

BorisMelnik wrote: post #28
MichaelGG wrote: post #14

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 ... ?

good point, not sure. maybe it is from people hitting play once and binge watching a series consecutively "your program will start in 3...2...1..."

But since most episodes are at least a dozen minutes long, that should only generate like 10 events an hour eh?

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

#34

Post by erikb »

Is that a joke? "We focus on the user use cases" "We use Cassandra" "here is a simple diagram, which our intern has drawn in the last 20 minutes" That's not a tech blog post!

This is how a tech blog post looks like: https://www.dropbox.com/developers/blog/48/how-the-datastore...

We don't need to know that you record where the user left off, we want to know how you do it and why. That you store that information every non technical person can see after using Netflix the second time.

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

#35

Post by jedberg »

MichaelGG wrote: post #14

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 ... ?

Close, it's 60 events per hour. Ie. Once every minute an event is sent in saying "they're here now!". It's also sending a bunch of data about your quality of service and so on. This serves two purposes -- one is that in case you suddenly disconnect, at least it knows within one minute of where you left off, and two, it allows for monitoring the overall health of Netflix by taking the average quality of service and making sure it isn't dropping rapidly.

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

#36

Post by MichaelGG »

jedberg wrote: post #35
MichaelGG wrote: post #14

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 ... ?

Close, it's 60 events per hour. Ie. Once every minute an event is sent in saying "they're here now!". It's also sending a bunch of data about your quality of service and so on. This serves two purposes -- one is that in case you suddenly disconnect, at least it knows within one minute of where you left off, and two, it allows for monitoring the overall health of Netflix by taking the average quality of service and ma…

Ah, well that makes sense. Though could you not store last position on the client then just sync on connect? Like, if handling so many events was too much a challenge. Or are crashes that big of a deal? At any rate, I guess that allows you some leeway with the writes - a few minutes of unavailability doesn't hugely impact anyone eh? Fun writeup.

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

#37

Post by ZeroGravitas »

chimeracoder wrote: post #29
rogerbinns wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They also bizarrely consider something that you have only watched a few seconds of (by accident) as watched and like to show recommendations by that. Through human eyes, Netflix's recommendations are especially dumb for the reasons you and I give. Equally pointless is recommending things I have already watched in a genre instead of other items in that genre, and doing a filter bubble where they keep narrowing down to…

My favorite example of these "dumb" (to human eyes) recommendations happened to me a year ago: https://twitter.com/chimeracoder/status/423877639666167808 . Note the reason Netflix recommended it. I have no trouble understanding why a recommendation engine might yield this sort of result (e.g. parents sharing accounts with kids), but I'm a bit surprised that Netflix doesn't do a better job of inferring when different…

In reality though it's a good recommendation (for your friend, not you), it just seems odd if you have a particular mental model of what a recommendation should be like, which this violates.

As you say the demographic that watches SVU is likely to have kids that watch Barney and may not be aware that it's on Netflix, so this is a good recomendation for parents even if they won't watch it immediately after some late night SVU binge but rather the next day with their kids.

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

#38

Post by dagw »

chimeracoder wrote: post #29
rogerbinns wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They also bizarrely consider something that you have only watched a few seconds of (by accident) as watched and like to show recommendations by that. Through human eyes, Netflix's recommendations are especially dumb for the reasons you and I give. Equally pointless is recommending things I have already watched in a genre instead of other items in that genre, and doing a filter bubble where they keep narrowing down to…

My favorite example of these "dumb" (to human eyes) recommendations happened to me a year ago: https://twitter.com/chimeracoder/status/423877639666167808 . Note the reason Netflix recommended it. I have no trouble understanding why a recommendation engine might yield this sort of result (e.g. parents sharing accounts with kids), but I'm a bit surprised that Netflix doesn't do a better job of inferring when different…

I remember Netflix recommending a whole bunch of random cartons and The Sons of Anarchy for my 4 year old daughter on her profile.

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

#39

Post by kyberias »

erikb wrote: post #34

Is that a joke? "We focus on the user use cases" "We use Cassandra" "here is a simple diagram, which our intern has drawn in the last 20 minutes" That's not a tech blog post! This is how a tech blog post looks like: https://www.dropbox.com/developers/blog/48/how-the-datastore... We don't need to know that you record where the user left off, we want to know how you do it and why. That you store that information every…

Your example blog post has missing images (404).

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

#40

Post by Ntrails »

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?

They'd run out of movies pretty damned fast if they did that...
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