Late-Evening Must-Read: Felix Salmon: The Diminished Social Utility of Netflix

Felix Salmon: Netflix’s dumbed-down algorithms:

One huge difference between TV and movies is that audiences have much lower quality thresholds for the former than they do for the latter. The average American spends 2.83 hours per day watching TV–that’s not much less than the 3.19 hours per day spent working. And while some TV is extremely good, most of it, frankly, isn’t. Television stations learned many years ago the difference between maximizing perceived quality, on the one hand, and maximizing hours spent watching, on the other. Netflix has long since started making the same distinction: it wants to serve up a constant stream of content for you to be able to watch in vast quantities, rather than sending individual precious DVDs where you will be very disappointed if they fall below your expectations….

The original Netflix prediction algorithm–the one which guessed how much you’d like a movie based on your ratings of other movies–was an amazing piece of computer technology, precisely because it managed to find things you didn’t know that you’d love…. Netflix… no longer wants to show me the things I want to watch, and it doesn’t even particularly want to show me the stuff I didn’t know I’d love. Instead, it just wants to feed me more and more and more of the same, drawing mainly from a library of second-tier movies and TV shows, and actually making it surprisingly hard to discover the highest-quality content…. This move is surely great for Netflix’s future profitability…. But there’s something a bit screwy about a world where I find iTunes to be a more useful discovery mechanism for Netflix material than Netflix itself.”