Netflix is a really wonderful service and one of the best things about it is the enormous scope of its inventory. If a title has ever been on DVD, odds are that they’ve got it. Having such an enormous selection has a downside though, how do people find movies that they’d like but haven’t heard of? Only a small handful of movies each year have serious marketing campaigns behind them and the rest are consigned to obscurity. Netflix has a vested interest in making people aware of movies they would otherwise miss; after all, customers can’t take advantage of all that selection if they don’t know what to watch.
The primary method Netflix uses to promote lesser known movies is its rating system; every movie can be rated by from one star (hated it) to five stars (love it). They encourage you to rate any movie you’ve seen, not just the ones you’ve gotten from them, because every time you rate a movie it creates a data point for them to try and guess what other movies you might like. The whole idea is to get you watching movies (and television shows) that you otherwise wouldn’t. If the recommendations are useful then you’re more likely to watch the movies you’ll like, you’re less likely to cancel your subscription and you might even recommend a movie (or the service) to people you know.
The rating system is one of the two or three most important aspects of their business because you can rent Dark Knight or Wall-E from anywhere; in fact, you can probably get them easier from your local Blockbuster than you can from Netflix, which frequently has “Very Long Wait” written next to a highly popular new releases. But it’s those other, less well known, movies where Netflix has its advantage. If you only watch two or three big Hollywood movies per month, you’re better off going to the video store than spending $16.99 with Netflix. But if you watch a lot of movies then it becomes much, much more cost effective to use Netflix.
Because this is so important, and because it provides a lot of free press, Netflix has offered a $1 million prize to anyone who can write an algorithm that recommends movies better than the one they currently use. Of particular difficulty are people who’ve only rated a handful of movies; there’s less data to go on and so the computer has to do a lot more guesswork. Accurately recommending movies to those people, who might only be trying the service, is worth a hell of a lot more than one million dollars to Netflix.
In line with that I have a small suggestion that has nothing to do with the prize but might be helpful anyway. Many DVDs, especially those that are not the extravagant “Collector’s Edition” types that come out for big name pictures, come loaded with trailers for other movies. Sometimes they play automatically when you load the disc; sometimes they’re just in the menu under “special features”. Either way though, you’re watching a disc you got from Netflix and seeing trailers for other movies you might like to see. Here’s where the ease of the system breaks down.
Every movie in their inventory has a webpage. On the main page is a list of other movies rated highly by people who rated this movie highly. There is also a separate tab you can click which will list similar movies, movies by the same director, or movies starring the same actors. If I want to add one of those movies to my Netflix queue all I’ve got to do is click the little “Add” button and it’s done. But nowhere on the page is there a listing of the two or three movies for which I might have seen a trailer while watching this one. If I want to add one of those movies to my queue I’ve got to find it manually.
Finding this manually is bad. That means I’ve got to remember that I was interested in one of the trailers (and after watching a movie how often do you think back to the trailers you saw two hours ago?) and remember the title. It certainly isn’t that much of a hassle, but it’s also almost completely unnecessary. Putting links to the trailer movies on there would eliminate that hassle, plus it would put relevant titles in front of someone who may have only ever rented one disc from Netflix.
Based on nothing more than the excellent website they currently sport I don’t think their programmers would have too much trouble implementing this. If it’s a question of finding out which movies have trailers on which discs, I’m sure the studio, or production company or whoever else sells the DVDs to Netflix would be happy to provide that information. (They put those trailers on there for a reason, after all). If that’s not feasible, you’ve got millions of users who are watching millions of discs, surely some of them would be happy to help.
Netflix does sometimes have different releases of different movies and some may have trailers on them while others do not, but so what? What harm would it be to put a little note on a page that says “Some versions of this movie contain trailers for the following:”. All you need is an “Add” button, it won’t cost a million dollars, and it’ll even work for people who’ve never rated a single movie.
