The article about how Netflix reverse engineered Hollywood was extremely interesting because not only was it relevant to what we have been learning about in class, but also to my everyday life. I love watching Netflix and most of my friends do as well, but most of my friends do not have the insight into Netflix categorization and metadata that I do. I have noticed the extended categories on Netflix before, but didn’t make the connection that this was metadata until reading this article. It makes sense that they want to categorize the movies as specifically as possible.
One of the first things the article mentioned that we talked about in class was the use of controlled vocabularies. In order to correctly categorize movies, they had to pick certain words and phrases to use and orders that these words should be put in. The article spends a lot of time dissecting the controlled vocabulary of the lengthy category descriptions and figuring out how all 90,000 categories were formed. It turned out that this metadata was not all of the metadata that was used for categorizing the movies, and actually not even close to scratching the surface. When the author met up with the man that made the actual categorizations it became apparent that the metadata that went into making the classifications was much more complicated than some controlled vocabulary tags. This metadata was made up of categories that rated each movie on its main characters, romance, likeability, and main actors. All of this metadata makes up what is chosen for the public metadata categories.
This metadata is what makes Netflix so successful at not only keeping subscribers, but also getting new ones. It makes sense that they would advertise similar movies next to movies that people are watching and appeal to what people want. Most people already understand this, but another thing I learned from this article is that more surprising is that they use all of this information also when they are creating shows. Wildly successful shows right now such as Orange is the New Black and House of Cards were created by the people of Netflix that have already been studying what people want. Through these shows they give people elements of television that they have observed as the most popular. After learning so much about Netflix’s system of categorization through metadata, I am very curious to learn more about the metadata of my other favorite websites like Facebook, Spotify, and Pandora.
