What Netflix Needs To Learn From Pandora

Over the last few years, Pandora has emerged as one of the premier radio stations on the net. The service allows listeners to set up online accounts and then rate music according to their tastes. What is so neat about the service is that Pandora uses an extremely detailed rating system for every single song and knows that I like Nina Gordon’s version of Straight Out of Compton because it’s a great cover song and it knows that Thomas Hawk likes it because it features gangsta rap lyrics that he identifies with.

In creating their recommendations, Pandora screens “everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of singing and vocal harmony. It’s not about what a band looks like, or what genre they supposedly belong to, or about who buys their records - it’s about what each individual song sounds like.”

What I’ve noticed about Pandora is that it offers a very good unbiased way to discover new music. Whether it’s the elaborate rating process that they do or the fact that they don’t allow advertisers to bias their recommendations, the service has been great for discovering songs and artists that I’ve never heard of and their recommendations have been spot on about 95% of the time.

Netflix (NFLX) offers a similar recommendation system for movies, but 31 reasons thinks that their ratings are fundamentally flawed and has resorted to giving Netflix false information in an attempt to try and trick Netflix into offering better recommendations.

31 reasons seems to think that part of the issue with Netflix recommendations is that they give too much weighting to genres and not to the different aspects found in movies. While undoubtably, Netflix’s rating system could be vastly improved by allowing their members to rate 20 different categories on each film instead of just a one to five star rating, I also think that Netflix’s problems may be deeper than just having a too simplistic recommendation algorithm.

My issues with Netflix are two fold, first and foremost, ever since I stopped rating movies at Netflix, my movie recommendations have become meaningless. Now this may end up being my own fault because I stopped using the site, but the reason I stopped was that I maxed out my queue at 500 films and it doesn’t do me any good to keep rating (or even considering using the recommendations) if I don’t have a way of flagging the films that look interesting as something that I might want to watch in the future. While I can understand some of the business reasons behind the 500 queue limitation, I fail to see why Netflix is unwilling to build support for some type of wishlist functionality that would allow their members to build a queue above and beyond the 500 movies that they can rent now.

I think my second reservation with Netflix’s recomendation system is that, over time, I’ve started to question how unbiased Netflix’s recommendations really are. For the most part, I think that Netflix ratings are tied to an algorithm that looks at my film ratings and not their inventory, but I can’t tell you how many times they’ve suggested Memoirs of a Geisha to me and how many times I’ve told them that I have zero interest in seeing that film. Knowing that this film (and many other recomendations) are from films that are part of Netflix’s Red Envelope production group makes me suspicious that Netflix may be engaging in a little envelope stuffing by promoting their own films in lieu of better recomendations that might be more appropriate for my movie tastes. If this is in fact the case, I think that it is a huge ethical issue for Netflix.

Advertising has turned out to be a popular area for Netflix and while I’ve been critical of some of their forced banner ads, I’ve also accepted them as a customer and know that if I click on one that I’m leaving Netflix’s site. If Netflix is in fact engaging in movie payola with their recommendations, than this is an even more serious concern because customers believe that those recommendations are unbiased and are trusting Netflix’s algorithims to show the most relevant results and not what they happen to have in stock at the moment. In the past the company has sent emails promoting their independent films to members who liked similar movies, but they give you a clear way to opt out of these advertisements, if you’d prefer not to receive them. If Netflix is also giving these films an unequal weighting within their recomendation software and then are failing to inform consumers or to give consumers a way to opt out of payola recommendations, then there is a bigger issue that needs to be addressed here.

In the end, Netflix’s recommendation software is certainly better then walking into a video store and suffering from brain freeze, but at the same time there is so much room for improvement that I’m surprised that the company hasn’t already created an update to their algorithm software. Maybe at some point they will remove the 500 dvd cap and clarify their recommendation policies, but until they do, I will continue to use other sites to find and discover movies and will manually add them to my queue as I find new films that I know that I want to see.

Comment on this article

Comments

[Edward Murrow:]

Netflix absolutely skews recommendations based on which studio pays them the most money to 'pump' particular titles. Your recommedations aren't what you want to watch; they're what the studios want you to watch.

2006 Sep 19 01:19 PM

[C. Hendry:]

However they do it, the recommendations aren't useful. I have given little thought to why they aren't. The ratings by renters are relatively reliable although limited. Some hair splitting might encouragement more rentals for even brief segments. I find the service generally OK although this year erratic in acknowledging receipt of returns and slower service. If I didn't have enough to think about, I might consider more options but I do.

2006 Sep 19 02:14 PM

[FourBrane:]

You want to comment on 500 movies? Clearly, you have too much idle time on your hands. If you watched 500 movies in a year, that's over 14 hours of zoning out in front of your DVD player EVERY WEEK!
Get a life.

2006 Sep 20 04:32 AM