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Netflix Awards $1 Million Prize and Starts a New Contest

31 points by asnyder 17y ago

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PowderAlarm 17y ago
Netflix has definitely got their ROI from free marketing alone. How many articles have you read about this from Wired, Washingtonpost, NYTimes, etc in the 2 years? This could definitely be a good marketing strategy for a startup with low marketing costs. $100,000 programming prize might be one method for getting your name out in the press, and get you some free work.
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baran 17y ago
Crowdsourcing is customer development to the extreme. By placing R&D in control of the customers, only products which are useful are likely to emerge. More companies (especially those which high brand recognition) should be using this technique. It generates quality products for relatively low costs.
- cma 17y ago
  As long as they utilize the inherent synergies to be found in surfing the cloud.
jodrellblank 17y ago
Another $1M prize fund? Why don't they spend a few thousand tidying up their awful website? They claim "You can browse, search or see our recommendations for you. [..] Over 100,000 titles on DVD" But when I try to browse their selection they show three pages of seven movies per section, with mystery-meat navigation (hover to get more details). That's 441 difficult to browse films.
- raghus 17y ago
  Hopefully http://feedfliks.com/search http://feedfliks.com/search is a little better?
  - jodrellblank 17y ago
    Worse - error 500. ;)
    - raghus 17y ago
      Hmm - it works fine now. Sorry about that hiccup.
pronoiac 17y ago
I read this, curious when the new rating system would be in place, but the next contest info surprised me: "The data set of more than 100 million entries will include information about renters’ ages, gender, ZIP codes..." Isn't that enough to identify many of the raters?
- pronoiac 17y ago
  It's enough to identify 87% of the people, apparently: http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/paul/netflixs-impending-still-avoidable-multi-million-dollar-privacy-blunder http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/paul/netflixs-impendin... I hadn't realized that someone identified some of the raters in the previous contest with their imdb ratings: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~shmat/netflix-faq.html http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~shmat/netflix-faq.html (I hope it's not bad form to reply to myself.) edit: Also, why this matters, page 44 of a research paper (PDF): http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1450006 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1450006

31 points by asnyder 17y ago

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

Netflix has definitely got their ROI from free marketing alone. How many articles have you read about this from Wired, Washingtonpost, NYTimes, etc in the 2 years? This could definitely be a good marketing strategy for a startup with low marketing costs. $100,000 programming prize might be one method for getting your name out in the press, and get you some free work.

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

baran 17y ago

Crowdsourcing is customer development to the extreme. By placing R&D in control of the customers, only products which are useful are likely to emerge. More companies (especially those which high brand recognition) should be using this technique. It generates quality products for relatively low costs.

cma 17y ago
As long as they utilize the inherent synergies to be found in surfing the cloud.

jodrellblank 17y ago

Another $1M prize fund? Why don't they spend a few thousand tidying up their awful website? They claim "You can browse, search or see our recommendations for you. [..] Over 100,000 titles on DVD" But when I try to browse their selection they show three pages of seven movies per section, with mystery-meat navigation (hover to get more details). That's 441 difficult to browse films.

raghus 17y ago
Hopefully http://feedfliks.com/search http://feedfliks.com/search is a little better?
- jodrellblank 17y ago
  Worse - error 500. ;)
  - raghus 17y ago
    Hmm - it works fine now. Sorry about that hiccup.

pronoiac 17y ago

I read this, curious when the new rating system would be in place, but the next contest info surprised me: "The data set of more than 100 million entries will include information about renters’ ages, gender, ZIP codes..." Isn't that enough to identify many of the raters?

pronoiac 17y ago
It's enough to identify 87% of the people, apparently: http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/paul/netflixs-impending-still-avoidable-multi-million-dollar-privacy-blunder http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/paul/netflixs-impendin... I hadn't realized that someone identified some of the raters in the previous contest with their imdb ratings: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~shmat/netflix-faq.html http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~shmat/netflix-faq.html (I hope it's not bad form to reply to myself.) edit: Also, why this matters, page 44 of a research paper (PDF): http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1450006 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1450006