>> Icy Winds <<

All this hype about the Netflix recommendation engine?! I don’t get it. They give some kids millions of dollars to suggest TWO (2!!!) movies to me after I’ve rated just under 200 movies.

Basically the only reason I signed up for Netflix in the first place, was to try and become interested in movies. I never really liked watching movies unless it was a social affair with friends going out to the movies. Usually when my roommates watched movies in the common room, I’d either be out, in my room or on my computer in the common room. I’m just not a movie person. I thought after this crazy contest to design an algorithm, they would make some decent suggestions about movies I should watch, so I signed up for the free trial, and this is my experience:

First, I spent a long time, rating movies, and racking my brains for any movie I remember seeing to make sure to get the right seeds for their recommendation engine. Only a few movies appeared in “Movies You’ll <3″ That’s okay, I said to myself, I just need to watch more movies and rate them. So I turned to genres that I knew I liked, and movies that friends had talked about. The movies it recommended however remained fairly low. I think it reached its peak around 6 suggestions, 2 of which were TV shows, which I don’t really want to watch. Over the course of the free month, I had watched 18 movies, and rated all of them, and have 2 suggestions at the end. Of the three movies I really liked (Mirror Mask, Mama Mia, and Bridge to Terabethia), Netflix really only introduced me to Mirror Mask, and it wasn’t even under my recommendations, i found it by browsing the fantasy category. I’ve looked at how I’ve rated things, and I have a fairly normal distribution of ratings, mostly 3’s, meaning I like most the movies. A fair amount of 4’s and 2’s which meant something noticeable happened that I wanted to express and extra amount of like/dislike. As well as a handful of 1’s and 5’s to show extreme (dis)favoratism. Maybe my rating distribution should not be quite so normal and I’ll get recommendations that way, I don’t know, I still like very few movies, and Netflix isn’t helping.

Time to end my subscription.