
Netflix's Viewing Data: How We Know Where You Are in House of Cards - trickz
http://techblog.netflix.com/2015/01/netflixs-viewing-data-how-we-know-where.html
======
saberworks
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?

~~~
rogerbinns
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
My favorite example of these "dumb" (to human eyes) recommendations happened
to me a year ago:
[https://twitter.com/chimeracoder/status/423877639666167808](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!

~~~
ZeroGravitas
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.

------
neumann
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>

~~~
oxryly1
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.

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

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

~~~
oxryly1
Thank you for the that link... that's pretty much what I'm looking for.

------
KeytarHero
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".

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utefan001
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-...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/knowmore-tv/how-orange-is-the-new-
black-stole-my-daughters-innocence_b_5595429.html)

~~~
dec0dedab0de
change the password next time they do it.

~~~
utefan001
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.

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BorisMelnik
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.

~~~
jaredsohn
>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.

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findjashua
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.

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

~~~
JoeAltmaier
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.

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MichaelGG
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 ... ?

~~~
jedberg
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.

~~~
MichaelGG
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.

~~~
jedberg
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.

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

~~~
jhgg
That's the logo for Apache Cassandra
[https://cassandra.apache.org/](https://cassandra.apache.org/) which is a
highly available, fault-tolerant database designed for write intensive
workloads.

The NSA probably uses it.

------
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...](https://www.dropbox.com/developers/blog/48/how-the-datastore-
api-handles-conflicts-part-1-basics-of-offline-conflict-handling)

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
Your example blog post has missing images (404).

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

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kissickas
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.

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falcolas
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
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
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.

