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4. Another dimension is how many stars the movie got, or in Netflix's case - number of thumbs up and thumbs down. Not sure how many people vote that way, but id
by xsenna 6y ago
4. Another dimension is how many stars the movie got, or in Netflix's case - number of thumbs up and thumbs down. Not sure how many people vote that way, but ideally it will be something like an IMDB score. I am quite prepared to give a try to what most people consider really good, but IMBD score is 0-10, while thumbs up is much more ambiguous and it probably works against movie buffs, who will thumb up only the best, but will be drowned in tastes of the average person. A movie that was voted higher than 8 on IMDB by a lot of people is highly likely a good movie that should be watched, regardless of genre, language, etc. The only problem IMDB has right now is a mass of Indian and Turkish voters (not sure if it's bots or just a flashmob crowd) that got quite a lot of their movies in the IMDB top. However, Netflix does not have this dimension at all. Movies that were highly rated by critics or curated lists also don't show up and so the judgement goes towards a common denominator, instead of receiving a bump from critics.
5. Finally, an issue that becomes apparent after some time, is just a really tiny library of movie content. If the info on the Internet is correct, there are no more than 5-10k movies in the Netflix library, this is nothing compared to how many movies are out there. Whole genres are not represented, where are the hardboiled Hong Kong action, foreign Sci-Fi, classic oldies, etc. It is not a direct problem of Netflix recommendation engine, but a limitation still. Again, if I compare Spotify and Netflix coverage, Spotify fares much better, with no more than 10% of artists that I listed to no listed. Of course, Netflix tries to switch everyone to watching just more of their own content which they can distribute without issues or additional cost worldwide. But if the market becomes fragmented, the movie discovery function diminishes in value.