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

http://techblog.netflix.com/2015/01/netflixs-viewing-data-how-we-know-where.html

by trickz • 11 years ago

79 46 11 years ago

techblog.netflix.com

saberworks• 11 years ago

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?

IvyMike2• 11 years ago

The Netflix UI is not completely consistent, so on some screens the option is not available, but in theory you can rate a movie as "Not Interested" for these cases.

cauterized2• 11 years ago

Haven't see a "not interested" option in the iOS app. Where does it show up?

cauterized2• 11 years ago

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.

yurymik• 11 years ago

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".

rogerbinns• 11 years ago

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 things like you have already watched.

chimeracoder• 11 years ago

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 people are using the same account, even when the users don't keep their profiles separate explicitly.

The amusing part is that I've never even seen the show myself. My friend happened to watch a single episode of Law & Order: SVU on my computer while she was staying at my place... and now I'm probably on a government list somewhere after this recommendation!

nilkn• 11 years ago

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

MichaelGG4• 11 years ago

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?

icehawk219• 11 years ago

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.

sib• 11 years ago

Yes, they should - this is a well-understood use case in recommender systems.

Ntrails• 11 years ago

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

falcolas• 11 years ago

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.

erehweb• 11 years ago

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.

kbenson• 11 years ago

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.

tempestn• 11 years ago

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

jhgg• 11 years ago

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.

neumann• 11 years ago

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.</rant>

lalos• 11 years ago

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.

oxryly12• 11 years ago

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/movie availability? Shows get added or removed on a regular basis and I always find out by accident.

(e.g. "Oxryly1! We do NOT have 'Guardians of the Galaxy' at the moment. We expect to add it in 4 months time. Thank you.")

</rant> indeed.

jaredsohn2• 11 years ago

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

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

javajosh• 11 years ago

You do realize this post was not about recommendations, right?

kofalt• 11 years ago

After using Netflix for quite some time, I have no evidence to support any hypothesis other than that their overall selection is secretly horrible and that they wish to conceal this however possible.

Evidence includes but is not limited to: Their user interface appears to intentionally border on unusable, a rambling Quora post by a C-level exec about how advanced search (a la Gmail) would ruin the world, and they've shut down their API, making it harder for third-party sites to index their selection, and allow positive UX to be possible thereby.

MichaelGG4• 11 years ago

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 ... ?

BorisMelnik2• 11 years ago

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..."

MichaelGG4• 11 years ago

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

jedberg2• 11 years ago

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.

MichaelGG4• 11 years ago

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.

KeytarHero• 11 years ago

Yet they can't seem to figure out that where I am in several movies is after the credits have started, and no, I don't want my homepage to recommend I "keep watching".

utefan0012• 11 years ago

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-...

dec0dedab0de• 11 years ago

change the password next time they do it.

utefan0012• 11 years ago

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.

findjashua• 11 years ago

the 2 'low hanging fruit' solutions they can implement to drastically improve the recommendations:

1. use the 'percentage of series viewed' as a weight for the recommendations, so i don't end up with a list of shows similar to the one i watched only for 1 episode

2. filter out the shows/movies i've watched already

i can't even imagine why these haven't already been implemented, seem like such a no brainer.

BorisMelnik2• 11 years ago

Surprisingly disappointed by this feature. "...Netflix records how much was watched and where the viewer left off." Isn't that kind of obvious?

I also wish there was a reset button for this. Sometimes I skim through a few seasons / episodes and when I go back and rewatch it there will be 3-4 episodes per season already watched and it will ask me if I want to resume, when in fact I don't remember.

jaredsohn2• 11 years ago

I also wish there was a reset button for this

There is. Click on Recently Watched, find the show of interest, click on the X to remove, and tell it you want to remove the whole series.

kissickas• 11 years ago

And yet they still can't figure out that if I skip the last 20 seconds of every episode in a 9-season series, that I've actually watched the whole episode.

erikb2• 11 years ago

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.

kyberias• 11 years ago

Your example blog post has missing images (404).

erikb2• 11 years ago

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

malloreon• 11 years ago

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

JoeAltmaier• 11 years ago

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.

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

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