Hacking NetFlix

Photos and Video from the Netflix Wizard of Oz Concert & Movie Screening in Central Park

I posted a set of photos on Flickr from the concert and Wizard of Oz movie screening in Central Park last night. There were an estimated 2,500 or more people in attendance, but so many showed up some sat on the lawn outside of the venue or left without getting in. 

Netflix posted several videos from the concert last night on YouTube, including Jennifer Hudson singing "Somewhere, Over the Rainbow."

Attending the Wizard of Oz Concert & Screening in Central Park Tonight?

If you're heading to the concert and screening of The Wizard of Oz in Central Park tonight, keep an eye on the weather. The temperature should be around 60 degrees, so bring a jacket or blanket.There is an extremely low chance of rain, but if it does Netflix has arranged for an alternate location. Detailed directions, updates and more information is available on the Netflix Wizard of Oz Concert page. 

FeedFliks Finds The Hidden Gems in Your Queue

Netflix queue analysis website FeedFliks has added an interesting feature that will analyze your queue using Netflix's recommendation engine and find movies you might be overlooking.

Wouldn’t it be cool to run your big Queue by Netflix and ask if there are any gems lurking far, far below in your Queue? You can now do that with FeedFliks. Just head to your account page and look for the ‘Analyze your Queue’ section (it’s near the bottom) and hit the ‘Yes, do it’ link and you’re done! 

How well does it work? I have almost 400 movies in my queue, and Feedfliks analyzed my queue and recommended The Usual Suspects (one of my favorite movies), Planet Earth (I'm watching it on Blu-ray with my kids), The Matrix (another favorite), Casablanca, The Green Mile, Memento, Fringe, and more. 

Instead of browsing for more movies, you might want to try the FeedFliks 'Analyze Your Queue' feature and see if you're overlooking any hidden gems in your queue.

via CNet.

Netflix and Long Tail Rentals Over Time

Chris Anderson, author of the Long Tail, writes about the Wharton team that analyzed the Netflix Prize data and discovered the following change to customer rental patterns over five years:

The chart shows that demand for the top 500 rentals dropped from more than 70% in 2000 to less than 50% in 2005, with demand for "middle" and "long tail" titles increasing.

From the Wharton paper:

The Wharton researchers also disagree with Anderson's theory and its implicit challenge to the Pareto principle, or so-called 80-20 rule, which in this case would state that 20% of the movie titles generate 80% of sales. Anderson argues that as demand shifts down the tail, the effect would diminish. Using Netflix data, Netessine and Tan show the opposite -- an even stronger effect, with demand for the top 20% of movies increasing from 86% in 2000 to 90% in 2005.

Anderson did his own analysis using the Wharton data and found lower demand for the top 500 products and more interest in the middle part of the curve. He also points out that a Long Tail adding up to 15% of total demand came from titles beyond the top 3,000 -- the amount typically stocked in a video store.

Redbox Launches 'Save Low Cost DVDs' Site To Fight Studios

Redbox has launched a community site called Save Low Cost DVDs to "inform and mobilize consumers" about the studios attempts to fight $1 per night DVD kiosk vendor Redbox.

“We are steadfast in our commitment to consumers and will not remain idle as a handful of movie studios work to prevent consumers from renting the movies they want, when they want them and at an affordable price,” said Mitch Lowe, President, redbox.  “SaveLowCostDVDs.com engages consumers in the discussion and provides a forum for the public to join the campaign and protect their rights.” 

via Inside Redbox.

Netflix New Releases for September 29th, 2009

Click here for the full list of new releases his week (117).

Interesting titles include Monsters vs. Aliens and Bonus: B.O.B.'s Big Break, The Brothers Bloom, Away We Go, Management, Lies and Illusions, Filth and Wisdom, Shrink, The Girlfriend Experience, How I Met Your Mother: Season 4, Kings: The Complete Series, Life on Mars: The Complete Series, Traffik, Warriors: Season 1, Fermat's Room, Note by Note: The Making of Steinway L1037, In a Dream, and Frownland.

New streaming releases include Push, Shrink, Californication: Season 3, Dexter: Season 4, Scream, Dreamland, Hack, Labyrinth, Kate & Leopold, The Fan, Ghost, Jerry Maguire, and Notting Hill (the full list is on StreamingSoon).

Note: Netflix will be showing the Wizard of Oz on Saturday, October 3rd only.

More Chances to Win VIP Wizard of Oz Tickets

Netflix is giving away more VIP tickets to the Wizard of Oz concert and screening in NYC this weekend via the Netflix Facebook page:

Saturday, September 26th at 1 p.m.
Meet us at Father Duffy Square (northern triangle of Times Square, located between 45th and 47th Streets, Broadway and Seventh Avenue) with a witch's hat or a funnel as a hat and tell us your favorite line from The Wizard of Oz for an entry into the drawing. 

Sunday, September 27th at 1 p.m.
Meet us at The Naumburg Bandshell in Central Park wearing something red and tell us your favorite line from The Wizard of Oz for an entry into the drawing.

Netflix VIP Concert and Movie Tickets Giveaway & "Oz Yourself"

Update: I removed the annoying auto-play video. If you want to "Oz Yourself," visit the website.

As part of the promotion around the NYC Wizard of Oz concert & movie in NYC next Tuesday, Netflix is giving away 2 VIP tickets on the Netflix Facebook page. 

You can also "Oz Yourself" by uploading a photo, and Netflix will put your face on the Scarecrow in a short video scene from the Wizard of Oz.

Wired Goes Inside Netflix and Tells the Roku Player Story

Daniel Roth from Wired takes a look behind the scenes at Netflix during the creation of the Roku Player and more in his story, Netflix Everywhere, Sorry Cable, You're History.

For weeks, he had tried to ignore the nagging doubts he had about the Netflix Player. Consumers' living rooms were already full of gadgets—from DVD players to set-top boxes. Was a dedicated Netflix device really the best way to bring about his video-on-demand revolution? So on a Friday morning, he asked the six members of his senior management team to meet him in the amphitheater in Netflix's Los Gatos offices, near San Jose. He leaned up against the stage and asked the unthinkable: Should he kill the player?

Three days later, at an all-company meeting in the same amphitheater, Hastings announced that there would be no Netflix Player. Instead, he would spin off the device, letting developer Anthony Wood take the technology and his 19-person team to a small company Wood had founded years earlier called Roku. But Netflix, which had already begun streaming movies to users' PCs, was hardly giving up on the idea of streaming them to televisions as well. Instead, the company would take a more stealthy—and potentially even more ambitious—approach. Rather than design its own product, it would embed its streaming-video service into existing devices: TVs, DVD players, game consoles, laptops, even smartphones. Netflix wouldn't be a hardware company; it would be a services firm. The crowd was stunned. In half an hour, Hastings had completely reinvented Netflix's strategy.

You can read the rest of the story on the Wired website.

New Netflix Prize Contest Raises Privacy Concerns

The second Netflix Prize Contest will release even more customer information, raising concerns that the movie rental data could be connected with customers, violating the Video Privacy Protection Act. Paul Ohm is concerned that the data might give too much information:

True, Netflix plans to release age not birthdate, but simple arithmetic shows that for many people in the country, gender plus ZIP code plus age will narrow their private movie preferences down to at most a few hundred people. Netflix needs to understand the concept of "information entropy": even if it is not revealing information tied to a single person, it is revealing information tied to so few that we should consider this a privacy breach.

I have no doubt that researchers will be able to use the techniques of Narayanan and Shmatikov, together with databases revealing sex, zip code, and age, to tie many people directly to these supposedly anonymized new records.

Because of this, if it releases the data, Netflix might be breaking the law.

Netflix's Steve Swasey wants to assure customers that the data cannot be connected to customers:

There’s no foundation for the concerns raised.

Netflix zealously guards its members’ privacy.  All the information we’re giving in The Netflix Prize 2 dataset is completely anonymous.  It contains no personally identifiable information. It does not contain anyone’s name, address, date of birth or any means to connect a particular record with a specific Netflix member. As in Netflix Prize 1, the dataset contains some movie ratings from select anonymous members. It also includes some Queue adds and taste preferences, broad age ranges, gender and zip codes but, again, completely anonymous.   All that data is modified – our scientists call it perturbed – to make it anonymous. 

Thanks to Jim for sending this in.