(no subject)

[trinityvixen]

Gotta love this article about the competition to improve Netflix's viewing suggestions. I, for one, think $1M is totally appropriate, if not even a little lean of a prize to offer. I've personally reviewed at least 1500 titles on Netflix only to get about one or two recommendations, usually out of the blue, no-way-I-would-ever-want-to-watch-that types. Sure, when you add something to the queue, you get a pop-up window with about ten new selections, but they're tiredly predictable. (Just because I wanted to see North by Northwest doesn't mean I have to see everything with Cary Grant or directed by Alfred Hitchcock nownownow.)

This is all relevant, too, seeing as the new Netflix-enabled XBOX 360 upgrade is, in a word, awesome. The picture quality is superb, and it automatically upgrades if you have the capability to broadcast the feed in HD. (We do, and we did.) It takes hardly any time at all to download and get started. (At least, one episode of a TV show did; I have not tried any movies just yet.) It works beautifully. Yes, you have to have a gold account to get the streaming across, but feiran does, and it didn't ask us to prove that she is in any way invested in my Netflix account. (The set up process took all of a minute. Bonus!)

And, relevant to this development: cinema is dead? (Again?) Yes, let us play the dirge for the cinema, it's gone gone gone. Because it's not like teenage girls just dropped $70M on Twililght this weekend or anything...

Comments

[edgehopper.livejournal.com]

The Netflix-XBox 360 works great. Now if they had a decent selection...

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Really? You're having trouble finding stuff to stream instantly? Because I have been shoving "Play now!" items down my queue for months in anticipation of this upgrade. I've got thirty titles, easily, ready to go, many of them television shows that will take me a while to get through. Television shows being streamable is brilliant, seeing as I've had one too many encounters where I get left with a disc ending in a cliffhanger. No more!

How long is your Netflix queue anyway?

[edgehopper.livejournal.com]

About 100 long. The only TV show I've found that I wanted to stream was 30 Rock--they removed Penn & Teller's Bullsh*t, and I don't think the Office is available anymore either. The comedy section of the instant movie selection is abysmal--the best I found was Austin Powers 2.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

I had The Office come up on the XBOX when I activated my account for the service there. Maybe that was a temporary thing? And yeah, I've been holding off 30 Rock until now, and it's' awesome.

Comedies are a problem, mm? Well, I guess that's true. I haven't got many on my queue that I've noticed, so I wouldn't be able to tell if they're conspicuously missing from the instant viewing list. I have a lot of small movies, big ones I missed in theaters, and older movies in addition to TV shows. No problems getting those to stream.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

Because it's not like teenage girls just dropped $70M on Twililght this weekend or anything...
They said cinema. That's crap. :)

(Crap that I'm actually looking forward to seeing--man if I didn't already know the books were so bad I would totally be excited about this.)

[viridian.livejournal.com]

Be excited! The movie is far less atrocious than the books, somehow.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

Not surprising, since pacing was one of the biggest problems with the book. That and being inside Bella's thoroughly boring and self-involved head. Also, there'll be RPattz to look at, and even with the pancake makeup, the man is hot.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

They said cinema. That's crap. :)

In fact, like it or lump it, that's what the article meant when it talked about "cinema." Specifically, A.O. Scott is talking about the movie theaters, regardless of what they're showing, and how the digital revolution is leaving movie theaters behind. Irrespective of how terrible the movie is that they're showing, cinemas are still doing pretty good business. But otherwise, yes, I agree, Twilight could be the death of cinema in the metaphorical sense.

(Crap that I'm actually looking forward to seeing--man if I didn't already know the books were so bad I would totally be excited about this.)

I've looked forward to movies on the Sci-Fi Channel with more enthusiasm. Even to laugh at, I can't find this an entertaining premise. I will, of course, watch it with you when you show it, seeing as I may then rant and rave with some background grounding other than my sixth sense that this sucks balls.

[hslayer.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'm really enjoying streaming on the 360. Which is good, since it's why I finally got Netflix at all. (As predicted, I still haven't dropped the one we watched on Friday into the mail yet.) It actually bumps you up to an HD stream no matter what (it did for me for The Office S1, even with my Xbox video out set to SD) if it's available. I agree with edgehopper that they need to beef up the selection, but I bet they're trying to do so and running into resistance from the studios who own the licenses. Like Sony, for instance, who told them they couldn't stream Sony Pictures movies to the 360 (though they can to other devices).

I'd also like it if they increased ways to access the site. I tried entering "netflix.com/mobile" into my cell phone's web browser, and sure enough, they have a mobile version of the site. And while you can search movies and manipulate your DVD queue through there, you cannot rate movies or manipulate your instant queue. Adding the ability to search all streamable movies to the 360 or other set-top devices would be ideal, but this would be nice, too, as I more often have my phone with me in the living room than a PC.

As for their movie recommendations, I just don't know how accurate they're ever going to be. I'm only part-way through the article, but they already mention how difficult it is for people to predict one another's tastes, even among people who know each other well. A few hundred 1-to-5-star movie ratings may just not be enough information to predict with great accuracy how much someone will like some other movie. Amazon gives me ridiculous product suggestions a lot of the time as well. Bear in mind this isn't remotely like the sort of searching Google does.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

I don't get the complaint about selection, as I've got so much on the instant-play queue right now that I could watch nothing but for at least two-three weeks and not be done. I suspect that you, being new to the service, just haven't had the chance to get a balls-load more added. Whatever the defects of the suggestions Netflix gives you, they do manage to sell me on stuff all the time. And, increasingly, the titles I add are instant-play available. The Sony thing doesn't surprise me, what with how pitifully the PS3 is doing in the market, but there are a lot of titles available as far as I've seen. I was on top of this from the day they started streaming, and believe me: this is a maaaaaaajor improvement. So, perhaps, I'm biased. (By that, and the fact I have a jillion movies in my queue.)

Increased site access would be fabulous. I was having to add movies from my PC to the XBOX, which, for me, isn't hard since I have a laptop. But that was still an extra step that really could be streamlined, especially for people without laptops. I'm not as phone-tech enabled, but I can see how mobile service is a good idea, too.

The movie recommendations need to request a lot more specific information from customers, though not with the biological/geographic data (as the article specified), if they're going to work better. My feeling is that you could make it better if there were another option when you pick out a title to say why you were picking it. It's another layer and most people wouldn't use it. But for the people genuinely interested in getting new suggestions, it would be really helpful, and it's just one more rating tick. Like, if you threw on their example of Napoleon Dynamite, say, because people wouldn't stop talking about it ("Friend recommended") or you read a review about a movie you were interested in but not going to pay to see in a theater, that would help define user tastes much better. But, like I said, it's more work for the users, so it might not necessarily fly.

[hslayer.livejournal.com]

I think the issues with streaming selection may boil down to user mentality. ("Some look at the instant queue and say WOO! I look at the DVD queue and say WTF?") But I expect the percentage of movies and shows that are streamable will continue to grow, childish corporate antics notwithstanding.

Mobile access is a little silly, I admit, as it is for many sites for which it's available. But for someone like me who hasn't seen *anything* and has a mind like a sieve, the idea of being out and hearing someone mention a movie and being able to add it then and there (which, admittedly, I can do now with my DVD queue, just not instant) is nice.

If they do move to a "singular value decomposition" system as mentioned in the article (“You can find things like ‘People who like action movies, but only if there’s a lot of explosions, and not if there’s a lot of blood. And maybe they don’t like profanity,’”) they definitely should do as you say and allow users to tweak those parameters themselves. The number of possibilities would be massive, and in the end it'd have only one's own ratings to go on. I've rated around 280 movies, and I feel like that's probably not enough to nail down even some tastes I'm very consciously aware of.
But that's just one of countless potential pitfalls in a system like this. I usually do a pretty good job of guessing from a trailer whether I'll like a movie or not, so I have lots of 3-5 star ratings, but very few 1-2 star ratings. While it may have a good grasp on what I like, it probably has no idea what I hate, and even the best system can only go on the info its given, so my distaste for gory movies (while enjoying action and more psychological horror) may not be a parameter it can nail down without my help.
No system will ever be perfect in this regard, anyway. My closest friends don't always guess right what I'll like, nor do I myself (I said I'm "pretty good" at it). Personal tastes may be sufficiently complex to amount to a chaotic system which can't be modeled VERY accurately no matter how much data one has.
Expectations should be managed, too. I also sometimes see a trailer or read a review and am entirely uncertain if I'll like the movie or not. If the system gave not just a predicted star rating but a certainty level, it'd be more meaningful. They could either show the certainty to users to choose as they like, or if they thought that too complex, just let people select an option like "Show me anything you think I might like" versus "Show me only things you're pretty sure I'll like" (maybe make showing the certainty value itself a third option).

Makes me wistful for my days on the Artificial Intelligence track in Columbia's CS department....

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

I think another problem is the five-star rating. I think it's too limited. There are very few movies I'll rate 1 or 5 because those are the superlatives. But that leaves only three options for movies I'm not 100% for/against--didn't like, liked, really liked. Three should really be "indifferent" and there should be slight more/less positive and then more emphatic positives/negatives before the superlatives. It's not a sure solution, but it would be a better gradient to use.