Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, and Matthew Wrather overthink Netflix, the Netflix queue, and the phenomenon of movies disappearing and reappearing on the service.
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Your Panel
Further REading
- What’s New on Netflix Streaming from Vulture
- List Of Notable TV Shows And Movies Expiring Soon On Netflix US Streaming on /r/NetflixBestOf
- (Root Beer) Tapper
- Hyperreality on Wikipedia
- The Global and The Universal by Jean Baudrillard
- Cards Against Humanity
- Commodity Fetishism
- Seneca the Younger on Wikipedia
- Stoicism on Wikipedia
- How Netflix Reverse Engineered Hollywood
The algorithm for recommendations makes sense to me upon hearing it, and answers some questions. Namely, why the algorithm works like hot garbage for me now. When I had the DVD service, it was almost always spot on. Even now, when I reboot it for a couple months a year to watch movies from the prior year I missed, the recommendations make sense.
The instant streaming recommendations simply do not, especially when it comes to movies. The TV recommendations make some sense, if only because I feel like they probably throw the same shows at everybody. I think maybe they just take the scattershot approach of a horoscope now. You throw enough stuff out there, and eventually something sticks with somebody.
I’ve even stopped bothering to rate things, because it didn’t seem to have any impact. No matter now clear I make it that I have ZERO interest in horror, there are always a bunch of cheap direct-to-DVD horror flicks on there. I don’t want reality shows, but a ton of them are on there. It’s tedious to try and have to sort through. So I pretty much don’t. I’ll just think of something I want to watch, and then plug it into the search to see if it shows up.
Also, Big Trouble in Little China has been available before. I know because I watched it. Circle of life, man.
Just saw an article about the ranking algorithm in the age of streaming, which makes a different but related point: Since Netflix can’t afford to license for streaming the content that you might want, it makes very little difference if they can recommend something to you based on your preferences — they probably don’t have it available to stream.
Matt, this puts the job of Netflix’s ranking algorithm into a very different light – the job of the algorithm isn’t to find the movie that you would like the most. The job of the algorithm is to convince you that that the movie which Netflix has on offer are the movies that you would like.
So the movies “sitting in my queue” are a fundamentally important part of your business model – “I can’t quit my subscription, because look at all this stuff I still have to watch”. If your queue is empty, why would you keep the subscription?
So the “You might like X because you like Y” is really a psychological play – “you liked Y, RIGHT? Then why don’t you ALSO like X? After all, you enjoy 50s British Dramas about Working Class Women, DON’T YOU??” So you add the suggestions, never watch them, and never quit becuase I have all this stuff I need to watch.
If your queue is empty, why would you keep the subscription?
I mean, at that point why would you go on living?
I agree that the in the instant streaming world, the role of the recommendations has changed. I’m not sure I see it as a hectoring, passive aggressive relative in quite the way you describe, but I think the idea is to remove as much friction as possible between the end of one video and the start of the next.
Behavioral economics and experimental psychology are demonstrating that given a choice between “do nothing and through inaction choose the default option” and “do literally anything at all and pick the alternative,” the former is going to win. Anecdotally, I’ve been noticing more and more “infinite scroll” tactics on the Internet — social media pages that go on and on and autoload new content at the bottom; slideshows that seamlessly bleed into the next; video playlists that auto-advance when one finishes.
So making “keep watching more of the same” the default option is good for business. (Though is it? I mean, wouldn’t it be better if they had a gym membership model where everyone paid and nobody showed up?) The idea is to increase snackability to a pathologically high extreme.
I am just happy to know that I am not the only one who goes directly to Star Trek Deep Space Nine on Netflix Instant.
In the spirit of this podcast getting hijacked by rathole topics, let me hijack the comment thread.
You know, though I was a big TNG fan during its original run, I fell off of DS9 pretty quick. I started out pretty loyal, and bought the CD-single of the DS9 theme song at my local Tower Records, which had an expanded bridge with a screamin’ guitar solo. Sometime in Season 2 I gave up.
Pushing through those first few seasons watching with my girlfriend (I’m now in 4), we’ve had a similar experience as the one we had re-watching TNG — after an initial 2 seasons which were guilty of all the things Trek is accused of (stilted writing, didactic plots, boundless moralizing), things really pick the hell up in S3.
Having been lucky enough to meet someone who worked on the Trek franchise over a long period of time in the TNG/DS8/VOY/ENT era, I gather that the TNG renaissance in Season 3 (my pick for the best season of that show) had to do with Gene Roddenberry’s withdrawal from the day-to-day operations of the show, leaving the writers free to include things in the plot like intra-Enterprise conflict.
I wonder if the improvement in DS9 S3 has to do with the withdrawal of the late, great Michael Piller, peace be upon him, to a consultant role (I guess he was going to work on Voyager). In Fade In, he describes “Roddenberry’s Box”—a vision of the Trek universe that reqired a set of highly restrictive constraints on the writers against which he and others chafed—and how it gradually morphed into “Piller’s Box” as he assumed a leadership role as the head writer of DS9. He himself admits that it was probably creatively healthy for him to withdraw, and the show is for sure better for it.
I want to throw in that I would be very interested to hear more about your take on Deep Space Nine in an overthinky kind of way as you get through it. In the past on the podcast you’ve made comments about the utopianism of the Federation that I think are directly addressed and explored in Deep Space Nine (and also Star Trek: First Contact).
Also want to add in that on the issue of personnel, another behind-the-scenes presence I think may be felt very strongly in DS9 is Ronald D. Moore, now best known for the gritty re-boot of Battlestar Galactica. He joined the staff of DS9 in the third season, which might explain why parts of DS9 feel like a gritty reboot of Star Trek. Not coincidentally, he also co-wrote First Contact.
I second this. I’m a diehard Niner and DS9 is second only to Farscape in my favorite space-opera TV shows, and I definitely think its relationship to the larger Trek universe is kind of unique and worth overthinking.
Also, when not watching Twin Peaks, I’ve started watching the Bryan Fuller-penned episodes only of Voyager. While they are heavy on characters I don’t really like, you can definitely see the seeds of his obsession with death.
While you’re at it – Hannibal comes back on TV next month, and it might be a good occasion for an overthink of the various iterations of that whole franchise.
Just learned of the existence of Hannibal while looking up who you were talking about (before reading your paragraph dealing with it–so that was funny). It’s my turn to second your comment!
That franchise is indeed rife for some deep analysis. Having not watched the show, I am most interested in comparing “Manhunter” with “Red Dragon”–two more-or-less unrelated films with different actors and directors which are both adaptations of the same book and have largely the same story. They are in some ways very similar and in some ways wildly different.
One of the interesting things about the show – and it’s probably my favorite thing on network TV at the moment – it that it’s loosely based on some background exposition in Red Dragon, the original book, and is a prequel of sorts that also rearranges the timeline and relationships of the characters.
Is the magic box something necessarily new though? I mean the concept of magic comes from people looking for explanations to things they don’t understand. Take dew, for example. The Greeks didn’t really know how dew got there every morning, so they made Ersa the goddess of dew.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ersa Yes, there is a Greek goddess of dew.
Well, it’s not that people think something like Netflix or Amazon is actually magic. I’m sure they feel like they understand it operationally if you ask them — or at least as much as they need to.
Whenever an article comes out slamming some sort of big institution for operating in a way that people don’t approve of — but which the institution has _obviously_ been doing the whole time — what it says to me is that people think they have demystified this service they’re using, when really they haven’t.
That’s the really pernicious thing about hyperreality or the fetishization of commodities — you don’t necessarily know you’re living in it or how it is affecting your thinking.
Speaking of failing first grade: Fenzel, care to take another stab at aging a movie from 1990?
Well if we are going to be nitpicky nitpickers, Wrather opened the episode by declaring it the year 2013. BOOM!
Just wait. If enough years pass, I’ll eventually be correct :-)
Pete was talking about Ghost and he said something like, “If Belinkie were here, he would doubtlessly point out… nah, I won’t say it.”
I have no idea what you were going to say. WHAT WAS MY BRILLIANT OBSERVATION ABOUT GHOST?
That there are parts of the movie where Demi Moore appears to be making out with Patrick Swayze, but if you were to see it from a third-person perspective, she’d actually be making out with Whoopie Goldberg, since Swayze’s spirit is inside Goldberg’s body.
My favorite part of Darkman is the scene where the computer instantly builds a 3D model of his face out of a photograph. But since the photograph is slightly damaged, the computer then needs to mirror one half of his face to the other half. The computer says this process, which is basically Photoshop’s clone stamp tool, will take something like 117 HOURS. (This explains why he can’t simply recreate his OWN face right away.)
Even as a kid, I remember thinking this seemed incredibly contrived, especially since the computer is clearly capable of doing things well beyond any real technology of the time.
But yes, this is a great Sam Raimi movie. Hey, is The Quick and the Dead on Netflix? Love that one.
Q and the D was on there at least once upon a time, because I watched it. And didn’t finish it, because it is garbage! GARBAGE! Good premise though. I’d like to see it remade. Who would replace Sharon Stone though? Is Jennifer Lawrence too young?
What I wonder is if the quintessential direct-to-DVD comedy, Sex Pot, still on there. It references both sex and marijuana right in the title!
You can’t top that cast. Sharon Stone, Gene Hackman, Russell Crowe, and Leonardo DiCaprio. Not to mention Gary Sinise, Lance Henriksen, and OTI favorite Keith David.
I haven’t seen it for years. Is it possible that it’s not as fun as I remember? You got to admit, great title.
See, “fun” is not a word I would use anywhere near this film. I thought it might be like that, with its premise and with Sam Raimi directing, even if I am not a Raimi fan per se, and the cast is definitely great. However, I just found the movie so ugly and unpleasant and not at all fun.
I’m going to respectfully disagree with Chris. TQ&TD was a great Rami-esque western.
This is not terribly related to the subject of the podcast this week but I recommend Blackfish. It’s a good documentary. That is, unlike other documentaries, it actually does a good job of presenting an argument, choosing good interview clips, and editing together something that is actually an engaging film. I like watching documentaries, especially on Netflix, but Blackfish is one of the few good ones I’ve seen.
My Netflix list is ridiculously long and I am fully aware of the fact that I probably won’t watch most of the movies. I do try and put in the time to write reviews though because if nothing else, they help me remember how I felt about a movie. For me, my Netflix list functions more like that heap in that Netflix rarely adds movies to instant streaming that I’m dying to see and instead my list is full of movies I feel I “should” see for one reason or another.
Wrather mentioned me in the podcast! I’m an effing wizard!
Seriously, Mark, find yourself a copy of Terminator Two. I remember the day it got rolled into my local arcade and kids were putting money down to play it. It was a delightful game. One day we played all the way through time to the end.
Justin
I wasted so many quarters in that thing. I remember my favorite thing about it is that if you push Start when there’s no money in there, it says “No way Jose.” Cute.
The list on Netflix being called a “queue” is, IIRC, really a holder from how the service worked when it was, in fact, DVD-only: Netflix would mail you DVDs in the order that they were listed on your queue. That is, of course, only if you used it as intended rather than doing what Wrather did and spending almost $200 on a copy of The Seven Samurai that he didn’t even end up owning. Though I suspect that was how they made up for the costs of shipping to the “power users” who did regularly return their discs.
I have a hunch that Fun Depot – which was a high end arcade/go-kart-track in the 80s and is now – like all such places – kind of run down and sad – might still have a T2 rail shooter machine. On that subject – I went to a laundromat the other day and they had a Marvel vs Capcom arcade machine, as well as something called “Johnny Nero: Action Hero” that is also a rail shooter – but is apparently only ten years old despite featuring far cheaper-looking graphics than my 18-year-old Nintendo 64.
Right now I’m watching Twin Peaks on Netflix, and it’s pretty great. It holds up well enough that the late-80s/early-90s stylings seem less hokey and more of a piece with the other Lynchian weirdness (especially for someone, like myself, who has watched Donnie Darko many many times).
Oh, goodness, I beg you — PLEASE don’t calculate my losses.
My apologies.
Oh that reminds me – I forgot to mention that I’m actually a subscriber to the Kindle edition of the Atlantic Monthly. Somehow it seems so much less imposing when your magazines are stored on an Amazon server somewhere and/or a microSD card instead of piling up around your apartment or house – but at the same time, I don’t really read them as promptly.
P.S. – This is my favorite kind of episode. I like when you have a wide-ranging subject rather than focusing on a single movie.
Look for more of that in the weeks ahead. We read our survey results. :)
I got Kindle magazines until I really tallied up what I was paying for them. The pernicious thing about micro-payments is how quickly they become macro-payments for micro-satisfactions. $1.99 here, $1.99 there, pretty soon you’re talking about real money.
On the vein of magic box vs. mom-and-pop store movie renting, I found out the other day that my public library rents DVDs– it doesn’t lend them, it actually charges money to take them out. I’m not even sure where that falls in the scheme of things, but it was a surprising revelation.
Yes, clearly I am going back and listening to old episodes of the podcast. This one holds up. I’m in a period of attempted self-improvement. I’m reading more these days. Not giant tomes but I’m making the effort to read physical books again.
My current approach to the daunting Netflix queue is to chip away at it slowly instead of ignoring it completely. Though it is alarming that movies get marked for expiration with sometimes only a week or two or warning.