Netflix - Not bad! Qwikster - uh, never mind...

And if You Liked the Movie, a Netflix Contest May Reward You Handsomely

By KATIE HAFNER
Published: October 2, 2006

Netflix, the popular online movie rental service, is planning to award $1 million to the first person who can improve the accuracy of movie recommendations based on personal preferences.

To win the prize, which is to be announced today, a contestant will have to devise a system that is more accurate than the company’s current recommendation system by at least 10 percent. And to improve the quality of research, Netflix is making available to the public 100 million of its customers’ movie ratings, a database the company says is the largest of its kind ever released.

Recommendation systems, also known as collaborative filtering systems, try to predict whether a customer will like a movie, book or piece of music by comparing his or her past preferences to those of other people with similar tastes. Such systems will look at, say, the last 10 books, movies or songs a customer has rated highly and try to extrapolate an 11th.

Computer scientists say that after years of steady progress in this field, there has been a slowdown — which is what Netflix executives say prompted them to offer the problem to a wide audience for solution.

“If we knew how to do it, we’d have already done it,” said Reed Hastings, chief executive of Netflix, based in Los Gatos, Calif. “And we’re pretty darn good at this now. We’ve been doing it a long time.”

Nobody with the company will be eligible to compete, Netflix said, so that it does not appear that the contest favors insiders.

James Bennett, the vice president for recommendation systems, said the company had taken great pains to preserve the anonymity of the 100 million movie ratings it was making available to researchers, even consulting with privacy experts to make sure that the ratings could not be traced to individual Netflix customers.

“The data set is the big deal here,” Mr. Bennett said.

Netflix has already used its data set to test the accuracy of its existing recommendation system, so it will be able to gauge the accuracy of each entrant’s set of predictions, executives said.

Mr. Hastings said he thought it was important to make the ratings database widely available. “Unless you work at Microsoft research or Yahoo research or for Jim Bennett here at Netflix, you won’t have access to a large data set,” he said. “The beauty of the Netflix prize is you can be a mathematician in Romania or a statistician in Taiwan, and you could be the winner.”

John Riedl, a professor of computer science at the University of Minnesota and a pioneer in the field of collaborative filtering, said that Netflix and Amazon now had the most advanced recommendation systems.

“Most of the easy stuff has been squeezed out already,” he said, adding that it had become increasingly difficult to make substantial progress in predicting accuracy.

“Any time you start working on any of these scientific or engineering problems, there’s a period of dramatic improvement,” Professor Riedl said. “It slows down because in a sense you’re competing with 15 years of really smart people banging away at the problem.”

Until now, researchers who have been working to improve recommendation systems have been relying on a much smaller database, a set of one million ratings generated by a Web site called MovieLens, Professor Riedl said. “Having a big data set would be really, really useful,” he said.

Francisco Martin, the chief executive of Mystrands.com, a company in Corvallis, Ore., that is developing a recommendation engine based on what people listen to on iTunes, agreed, saying, “With ratings-based systems, you need to rate everything you see in order to get reasonably accurate recommendations.”

Cash prizes in other difficult technical areas have been offered in recent years. In 2004, there was the $10 million Ansari X Prize for a reusable spacecraft. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is again running a contest involving robotic vehicles with the first prize $2 million. And NASA is offering prize money ranging from $200,000 to more than $5 million for building equipment including lunar excavators and solar sails — large mirror-based equipment intended to collect solar power and conserve rocket fuel.

Mr. Hastings said the Netflix prize was different from some others in that it required a minimal financial investment to compete. “This will be one of the largest truly open prizes that’s ever been done,” he said. “All you need is a PC and some great insight.” He said Netflix would publish a detailed description of the winning approach.

If no one wins within a year, Netflix will award $50,000 to whoever makes the most progress above a 1 percent improvement, and will award the same amount each year until someone wins the grand prize.

Professor Riedl noted that a big improvement in Netflix’s recommendation system would be a boon to the company’s business. “It could result in a significant rise in sales if the recommendations do a better job of helping people find movies they want to see,” he said.

I'd enter but I've got other things to do plus not a real mathematician? Maybe I should write in anyway with a spec.

Why do I like this Picasso but not that Picasso even though they're from the same period and share the same styles and brushstrokes?

record store genre labels generally tons and tons more effective than movie store genre labels!

1. Find a dozen or more customers whose movie selections over time have had almost no overlap

2. bucket other customers in with them according to who they overlap with the most

3. resample each customers' preferences for bucket fit every 3 months or so, or constantly, whatever

4. recommendations based on past and current preferences of secret "canary" customers determined in step 1. These can also change over time if one starts overlapping with another one too much- resample and find another set whose overlap values are at or below N, then rebucket.

Do this on an ongoing basis, resample and calibrate at least once a quarter.

Also, keep track of what previews are on what DVDs, and evaluate that with queue-add data to see if it has any value.

Has anyone tried the Watch Now feature? streaming movies ie only :O

i am watching BRAIN SCAN and drinking wild turkey life is good.

Just checking my "Movies You'll Love" page and one of their new suggestions for me is The French Chef with Julia Child "because you enjoyed Harold and Maude, Spellbound, amd Le Cercle Rouge. Hmm.

OI FUCK YOU SKIPPY MCSKIPPERTON SKIP BEE DOO
I ALREADY HAD TO SEND THE FIRST COPY BACK CAUSE IT WAS CRACKED
NOW THIS

BRAINSSSSSSSSS

I've had out 20 movies in the last month. I love it cuz it allows me to see stuff like God Told Me To and to take chances on absolute crap!

If you say you like Annie Hall, Netflix will recommend you fucking everything.

if your "absolute crap" in this case happens to be a series disc that only comes in box sets of 15, and you get two copies of disc 4 that are basically unplayable, do you sit on disc 5 for ANOTHER three weeks while one of the last remaining copies makes its way to your house on the off chance it's not also in terrible condition, or just give up and be angry?

Also, do you get angry at yourself for liking dumb weird shit and paying for this garbage, or angry at the world for being the lamest place anybody was ever forced to spend their stupid life?

Oh, the latter for certain.

What even is this 15 disc set? Did you get The King Jame Bible on DVD?

I just said "fuck you I'll just pretend I know what's going on I don't care anymore" and fired up disc five. fingers crossed

Judges/Ruth/Samuel?

i've had increasing numbers of bad discs which i guess is what you'd expect as the inventory gets older. annoying though. especially when it waits until halfway through the movie to suddenly freeze up and die.

meanwhile post office is mad at netflix. someone told me blockbuster uses sturdier packaging, is true? that might protect the discs better too.

I don't think the problems with bad discs are due to packaging. The packaging protects the discs well enough against scratching and smudging, which are the most annoying forms of disc damage. They don't protect very well against cracking, which is annoying, but not as annoying as a scratched disc, because you can instantly see that it's damaged and send it back. The problem with the scratched discs is that you don't know until halfway through the movie that there's a problem. I think that the scratch damage must be caused my people not keeping their discs in the paper sleeves or otherwise mistreating them.

Yeah, I've gotten a couple discs lately that look as if someone had been playing frisbee with them prior to sending them back. Or using them as a testing ground for sandpaper, not sure which.

Do you guys REPORT DAMAGED DISC? And do you know if they get rid of those discs when someone does?

No, they just rub some vaseline on them and send them off to the next poor tombot.

Seriously, what 15 disc series?

I've been killing the Netflix on-demand feature... all sorts of weird art documentaries on there.

I wonder what it is like to do a job interview for the job of rubbing vaseline onto shiny silver discs. "So what is your five year plan?"

"In five years I think I'd like to be eating less of the vaseline and maybe write something, like a book."

You guys seem to have many more issues with cracked discs and scratches than I do. I can only remember 3 of the latter in almost 4 years and maybe a dozen or so discs that have been actually unwatchable (maybe one or two a month have a had scratch serious enough that I miss more than a couple of seconds of something.) I remember having at least as many problems with the latter with stuff from my local videa store.

okay dumb netflix question--should EVERY disc we get from them have issues? like will freeze in the middle of a scene, and i have to fast forward and then go back to get it to play right? or is it our DVD player?

i had a bad run of scratched discs, no problems for the last few months. though with my old last-legs dvd player, even almost-new discs would have issues.

Is there visible damage on these discs? If so it's the discs. If not then your player might be wonky.

visible damage=looks like a really scratchy CD? then yes.

i use the blockbuster online cuz there is one close to me and you get the free in-stores anytime you want.

I lied, it's only a ten-disc set. And after watching disc 5 I think I'm going to wait for the new translation of the movies to come out instead, F this noise.

DAER NETFLIX LACK OF MAC SUPPORT FOR WATCH ONLINE OPTION EAT A DICK.

I try to always report a disc as damaged if it skips or won't play a section - they give you the option to have another one sent of the same or not, depending on how much of it you were able to watch and how much you care to see the rest.

okay dumb netflix question--should EVERY disc we get from them have issues? like will freeze in the middle of a scene, and i have to fast forward and then go back to get it to play right? or is it our DVD player?

My 1999, $300 player did this. I replaced it with a new $40 player and everything plays fine now.

So about this "watch instantly" feature:

1) If the quality is shit on my pc laptop, is that just because I lack a good, uh, video card or something?

2) Why do they not have a player for mac and when will they have one for chrissakes?

really wanna see the dirt on how their "movies you'll <3" system works

History of the World: Part 1

Because you enjoyed:
Conan the Barbarian

appearance of swords? conan the barbarian is connected to a ton of suggestions...

Dave Chappelle: Killin' Them Softly

Because you enjoyed:
The Wire: Season 1
The Wire: Season 2
Eddie Murphy: Delirious

lol black ppl

the intergenre connections are weird too

Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind

Because you enjoyed:
The Fog of War

you enjoy movies about weather phenomena

2) Why do they not have a player for mac and when will they have one for chrissakes?

^^^^^
yes. wtf.

Any other Mac-using netflixers tried the streaming player yet? I'm downloading the Silverlight plugin now.

I was under the impression that this didn't work on Macs.

New for Macs in the last week or so (in beta).

Oh neat. I'll have to take a look. Between baseball and the election I've not watched a lot lately.

http://www.insanely-great.com/news.php?id=9842

NetFlix goes live for the Mac
by M. Sharp, Insanely Great Mac
November 2nd 2008

VentureBeat reports that Netflix has opened the beta of its Watch Instantly to all of the company's Mac-using subscribers.

For any and all who might be interested (Netflix subscription and Microsoft Silverlight required), here's the opt in form—http://www.netflix.com/silverlightoptin.

That said, there are some caveats:

• It's a beta, so there will be bugs

• It's a Microsoft-powered beta

• Not all Netflix movie titles are available

• No HD playback

• Using your Mac for playback will count as one of the six devices allowable (ie Roku box, Blu-ray players, etc) under Netflix terms

Previously, Watch Instantly for Mac was a closed beta.

One commenter to that story reports not being able to get it to work.

probbaly has a ppc mac