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

41–49 of 49 posts

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

#41

Post by erikb »

kyberias wrote: post #39
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).

That's really interesting. The pictures still worked when I posted the link.

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

#42

Post by dec0dedab0de »

utefan001 wrote: post #19

If only Netflix could figure out the complex algorithm needed to prevent my children from being able to change their profiles from "teen" to "adult". http://www.huffingtonpost.com/knowmore-tv/how-orange-is-the-...

change the password next time they do it.

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

#43

Post by utefan001 »

dec0dedab0de wrote: post #42
utefan001 wrote: post #19

If only Netflix could figure out the complex algorithm needed to prevent my children from being able to change their profiles from "teen" to "adult". http://www.huffingtonpost.com/knowmore-tv/how-orange-is-the-...

change the password next time they do it.

As far as we know, our kids have never done it. I just want to prevent the ability to do it. Working with netflix tech support multiple times, unless you live in Germany, you have to have all netflix profiles set to "teen". Otherwise your children can see shows full of sex scenes if they accidentally click on your profile button.

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

#45

Post by JoeAltmaier »

malloreon wrote: post #44

try this, Netflix: if I've rated it, don't ever recommend it to be outside of "watch it again"

So much that. I watch a lot of movies. Now, most movies Netflix show me are movies I've watched. What's the point in that? Its infuriating.

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

#46

Post by [deleted] »

utefan001 wrote: post #43
dec0dedab0de wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

change the password next time they do it.

As far as we know, our kids have never done it. I just want to prevent the ability to do it. Working with netflix tech support multiple times, unless you live in Germany, you have to have all netflix profiles set to "teen". Otherwise your children can see shows full of sex scenes if they accidentally click on your profile button.

[deleted]

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

#47

Post by jedberg »

MichaelGG wrote: post #36
jedberg wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Many devices don't offer local storage to Netflix. Also, if your device crashes or your internet drops, there is a good chance that you're going to try and watch on a different device.

It makes for a much better customer experience if we don't have to rely on your device saving the information and calling home appropriately.

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

#48

Post by yurymik »

cauterized wrote: post #6
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?

Yup. Similarly, I wish they'd stop recommending entire sets of options based on a TV show I abandoned halfway through the first episode three months ago because it was so bad.

Just go to https://www.netflix.com/MoviesYouveSeen and remove said show from your history. I do this every time our guests with small children watch cartoons, but fail to switch into "kids mode".

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

#49

Post by oxryly1 »

jaredsohn wrote: post #31
oxryly1 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/ )

Thank you for the that link... that's pretty much what I'm looking for.
Post reply on HN