Hacking NetFlix

New Releases for May 1st, 2007

Click here for the full list of new releases this week (81).

Interesting movies include Dreamgirls, Little Children, Alpha Dog, Happily N'Ever After, Iraq in Fragments, The Sandlot: Heading Home, The Hitcher, Who the #$&% Is Jackson Pollock?, Mahogany, Shirley Valentine, Michael Palin: Around the World in 80 Days, and The 2006 Academy Award Short Films Collection.

Fortune Wants Your Questions for Reed Hastings

Fortune wants your questions for Netflix CEO Reed Hastings at questions@fortunemail.com.

Currently waging a war for subscribers with movie-rental rival Blockbuster, Netflix founder and CEO Reed Hastings takes your questions. Can he fend off Blockbuster's attempts to gain market share? What's the latest on Netflix's movie download service? And what movies are in his rental queue?

Thanks to Doron & Richard for sending this in.

Jack Valenti, Controversial Head of MPAA, Has Passed

The New York Times is reporting that Jack Valenti, controversial head of the MPAA, has died. Something I didn't know about him:

As an Army B-25 pilot in World War II — the Naval air corps had rejected him because of a heart murmur — he flew 51 missions over Italy, but never piloted a plane again after returning his flak-battered bomber to the United States. He went to Harvard Business School on the G.I. bill, then returned to Humble Oil’s advertising department, where he helped its Texas gas stations jump from fifth to first in sales through a “cleanest restrooms” campaign.

While I have problems with some of the MPAA's policies, I have small children and look for the MPAA rating on movies I rent for my kids.

Longest Movie at Top of Your Queue?

Evan writes, "I wonder what's the longest someone has had a movie in the top 5 without ever seeing it by pushing it back over and over again. I have had Dark Water in my top five for a few months now but you have had "Make your own movie disc 1" for as long as I have paid attention to your netflix RSS feed."

I'm constantly updating my queue and rearranging the top rentals, so Make Your Own Damn Movie will probably be there a while longer (I really don't have an interest in making a movie, but I'm curious about the process).

What's the longest you've held off renting a movie that's been at the top of your queue?

How Many Copies of a Movie Does Netflix Buy?

Kraig asks, "Do you know by chance how many copies of each title Netflix gets, because at what 8,000,000 members they'll have to get a lot. I am just wondering, because whenever I add a new release to my queue I don't get that new release for a few weeks. So I am just trying to figure out how many copies they get of each new release title so I can figure out my percentages of getting the movie faster."

Unfortunately, the number of copies of a movie that Netflix buys is probably considered a trade secret, but it would be great to know how many days they estimate it'll take for us to get a hot new release.

Netflix does have more than 42 million DVDs, but they probably won't tell us how many copies of Night at the Museum they bought.

Blockbuster Renegotiates Credit Agreement Again

Reuters is reporting that Blockbuster has again negotiated the credit agreement.

The amendment raises the value of sales, transfers or disposals of assets that Blockbuster may transact without lender approval to $250 million from $100 million.

Under the new amendment, Blockbuster must apply the net proceeds of those transactions to its debt, which totaled $984 million at year's end.

This is the fourth time that Blockbuster has amended its credit agreements since 2005 to service its debt, although the Dallas-based company has made progress in selling off video game and international assets.

Thanks to EZGuy for sending this in.

MPAA Trained Dogs to Find Pirated DVDs

The Softpedia is reporting that the MPAA has trained dogs to find pirated DVDs.

The dogs were trained over an eight month period to identify DVDs that may be located in boxes, envelopes or other packaging, as well as discs concealed amongst other goods which could be sold illegally in the UK. These DVDs are often smuggled by criminal networks involved in large scale piracy operations from around the world.

For their first major live test, Lucky and Flo were put to work at FedEx’s UK hub at Stansted Airport and were immediately successful in identifying packages and parcels containing DVDs for destinations in the UK. Luckily for the senders, none of them was counterfeited.

via Seth's Blog.

Netflix Won't Sue Innovators, Just Copycats

BusinessWeek has a story about Simply Audiobooks ("Simply Audiobooks Pumps Up the Volume") where they discuss the Netflix patents:

The threat of Netflix filing a lawsuit against Simply Audiobooks, as it did against Blockbuster (BBI) in 2006, didn't dissuade Neville, 33, and Singhal, 41. "We went ahead with it, kind of thinking 'Damn all the torpedoes; we'll deal with that if and when it happens.' But I'd learned enough in [a] law course to know that the patent was quite likely nondefensible," says Singhal (see BusinessWeek.com, 2/5/07, "To Patent or Not to Patent?").

In the end, the pair didn't have to add that worry to their plates. "There are innovators and there are imitators," says Netflix spokesman Steve Swasey. "Imitators are those that just replicate the service. We went after Blockbuster because they copied our service from top to bottom. Those were models we had patented. I'd consider companies like Simply Audiobooks smart companies—how they took a business model for one service and tailored it to another."

Here's more coverage of Netflix and patents.

Thanks to Joe for sending this in.

Reed Hastings in Forbes on Recommendations

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings wrote a Forbes article about movie recommendations and the Netflix Prize, The Real Stars.

On a typical day at Netflix, we send out 1.6 million DVDs to 6.3 million members from 44 warehouses. Those movies are drawn from 75,000-plus titles in 200-plus genres. But the most impressive Netflix number is the 1.7 billion movie ratings we've collected from our members over the last decade. Without that database--our network of customer information--our business would languish.

Here's how the recommendation system--a.k.a. collaborative filtering--works. Members rate 2 million or so movies online each day with a simple mouse click on one of five stars in a Likert-type scale ("strongly disagree" to "strongly agree") that sits beneath each movie title on our Web site. We plug the results into a ratings database that matches ratings of the same film by other renters. This item-by-item analysis requires lots of data conditioning heuristics--machine-aided learning, that is--to turn out nearly 1 billion predictions a day for Netflix members.

You can read the rest of the story online free.

Thanks to Hueristix and Greg for sending this in.

Independent Video Stores Trying To Survive

The Arizona Daily Star has a story about the ways independent video stores are changing to survive competition from online rental services, Online, mail videos hurt independents.

Tidbit from the story: About 12,000 to 14,000 of the country's roughly 24,000 video rental locations are independents, according to the Encino, Calif.-based Entertainment Merchants Association, the leading trade group for the video sales and rental industry.

But although they make up at least half the video sellers, the market share for independents was only about 38 percent in 2004, according to the association. In 1997, independents had a market share of about 55 percent, the association says.