"In other words, the recommendation technology at Netflix -- the softwares that says: based on your past ratings of movies you should like this new one -- will

"In other words, the recommendation technology at Netflix -- the softwares that says: based on your past ratings of movies you should like this new one -- will spur rentals as if it were a film earning at least $1 million at the box office." In other words, I am going to take an off-the-cuff statement with an absurdly round number, and treat it if it were actually fact. "Let's say that increase in DVD usage amounts to 10% of total sales. That's a lift of $100,000 per film on average." Let's add a few more hypothetical assumptions, with no basis in reality. "Netflix currently offers 70,000 films. That means that Netflix's recommendation engine is worth about $7 billion to the film industry." Now, we take our one hypothetical case, and pretend it were a law applied to all films. Voila! Now we've got our outrageous conclusion. QED. Kids: don't try this at home.