Wired is out with an in-depth article on Netflix and their plan to take over your television. While a lot of the article is a rehash of things we've heard before, a couple things stood out to us. The first:
Netflix has a well-earned reputation for using the information it gleans about its customers to drive everything from the look of the service to the shows in which it invests. That mountain is composed of two things. Garbage is 99 percent of that mountain. Gold is one percent. Geography, age, and gender? We put that in the garbage heap. Where you live is not that important.
Stereotypes about what one region might like versus another are largely useless to Netflix. One might assume, for example, that Netflix's anime streaming is heavily concentrated in Japan. Yet only 10 percent of the people who watch anime on Netflix live there. The other 90 percent, says Yellin, are distributed around the globe.
When you think about how content is distributed right now, it's largely organized around those sorts of superficial segmentations. You go to one site for news for millennials, another for shows about New York, another for what matters to women. But Netflix has mined the insane amount of data they have and found that these characteristics don't actually matter that much. Which, when you think about it, is both incredibly surprising and completely reasonable.
Netflix has mined the insane amount of data they have and found that these characteristics don't actually matter that much.
We're all snowflakes. And it should be easier to find the specific content that appeals to us. That's our goal at Stareable‚ to be a centralized tool for all of those unique niches.
The other interesting thing:
Its US catalog has dropped by more than 30 percent since January 2014, according to AllFlicks. That's at least 2,500 fewer titles in just over two years.
Netflix doesn't need to be a universal library. They just want to provide enough compelling content to maintain and grow their audience base‚ the goal is to find that one show that hooks you on a subscription. But they don't need users to exclusively consume their content, and that leaves plenty of room for online content creators that operate outside of Netflix. Internet television should mean a heyday for independent producers. And we are all incredibly excited about that.
