What's with Netflix? A few days ago they changed the look of the details pages for the movies. Things are moved around on the page and it looks less colorful, but it still seems to have the basic info I want, so I did not think much about it. Then I started noticing the predictions for how I would like the movies seemed to be a lot higher all of a sudden. I don't follow news releases or similar information at Netflix, so I don't even know where to look for information about such a change. So I did a Google search and did not come up with anything from Netflix itself, but I did come up with some forum discussions by subscribers.
The people on the forum were overwhelmingly irritated with Netflix, but their complaint was that Netflix had made changes to the friends features which seemed designed to phase it out. The complainers also agreed Netflix was non-responsive to customer input and as an egregious example cited how their numerous complaint postings about the matter at hand are being systematically removed from the Forum by the Netflix moderator. I did find one stray posting asking about predicted ratings jump ups, but the poster said he did not have a record of the prior predictions. Well I do.
Since the Netflix queue cannot be sorted by column (a glaring deficiency in my opinion), I maintain my own database of the queue for sorting purposes. When I enter a movie in my database, I put the date of entry and the Netflix prediction as of that date as part of the movie title. Then later, as I update the database, I change the entry date and put the current prediction in a separate column. I have been doing this for over two years, and I have never noticed the Netflix predictions changing much over time.
So now what I have done now is go through about 100 movies in my queue to see how much they have changed, and the changes are astounding. Of the 50 movies in my queue added most recently or up[dated within the last three months, 34 increased by up to almost one full star, 5 decreased mostly by just one tenth of a star, and 11 stayed the same (but one of these I had already rated and 5 were not predictions for me but rather all member predictions). The average increase for these 50 was .366 stars, quite significant for me since my own ratings usually only span from 2.7 to 3.5. Of the oldest 50 movies in my queue, last updated by me between May and November, 2009, 40 increased by up to 1.2 stars, 5 decreased by just one or two tenths of a star, and 5 stayed the same. The average increase for these 50 was .392 stars. For me personally, I will be discounting the Netflix predictions by .4 stars; my old cutoff for putting a movie in my queue was 2.8, but will now have to be 3.2.
Netflix has always skewed the features of its web site to encouraging rentals more than making the site useful to subscribers, but this unexplained, significant padding of the recommendation ratings is going too far. I read that the company stock has been running high, based on projections of adding new subscribers, but some financial analysts think the stock is overpriced. If the Netflix predictions of new subscribers re as inflated as their new projections of how I will rate movies, I think the analysts are right.
No comments:
Post a Comment