Before reading Alexis Madrigal’s article “How Netflix Reverse Engineered Hollywood”, I wasn’t aware that tens of thousands of microgenres even existed. Moreover, I was skeptical of the fact that Netflix recommended movies based on all the different films and TV shows that we previously watched. I just thought that Netflix recommended the same movies to almost everybody and only claimed to tailor recommendations as some sort of marketing scheme. I didn’t think there would be a group of people who sat down, analyzed, and tagged all the different films to put such a vast project together. Therefore, after reading Madrigal’s article, my appreciation and respect for Netflix grew tenfold. It reminded me about the years and years of hard work that Pandora employees had to invest in order to create the music genome project, which is similar to Netflix in that it endeavored to analyze and tag every song, artist, and album in order to recommend music to individuals. Another example would be Yelp. Yelp endeavors to compile a list of all the restaurants and different arenas of the service sector and tags each establishment in order to recommend places to eat and where one should take his car for maintenance or repair as an example. In this post, however, I wanted to focus on the system of classification and how recommendations and reviews in Netflix lead the masses in society to watch similar movies and shows.
Although Netflix has 76,897 ways to describe a movie through genre tagging, only a very small fraction of those genres are seen in one’s personalized Netflix home-page. The genres that you see are most likely the most popular genres. Moreover, one huge determining factor that goes into the selection of movies that are shown in the front page is the review or star process. The movies and shows that we see in the front page are usually ones with great reviews or the most number of stars. This is one reason why I see a vast majority of similar recommended movies and films. For example, my Netflix home-page and my friend’s home-page share many of the same movies. In fact, sometimes our home-pages look almost identical. Although, of course, personalization comes into play and we do see some differences in the recommendation of movies, for the most part, it seems as if Netflix showcases movies that are highly rated and popular. Since, people only want to watch the best and top-quality movies, as a society, we end up watching movies from a pool that is essentially not that vast at all. This makes me think about the future and how maybe if this trend of classifying and recommending continue as it has for the movie industry such as Netflix and the music industry such as Pandora, Spotify, etc, then we as individuals in one nation might prove to be strikingly similar to one another.