How Netflix plans to keep viewers glued to their screens for even longer.

How Netflix plans to keep you glued to your screen for even longer

fact that the average lag time between finishing one series and then committing to a whole entire other series is three days. It takes most people an entire long weekend before committing themselves to like 20-plus more hours of television, and they can’t even not watch something in the interim — they feel the need to fill that gap with a movie, a little snack between trips to the all-youcan-eat buffet.

Ted Sarandos, chief content officer of Netflix, confirmed that this was typical of the Netflix experience. “We find that you’re either a very casual user, or it’s a part of your daily life,” he said over the phone. “And for most of our members, it’s a part of their daily life.” He also explained that the typical Netflix user finally be the time you decide to watch The Ranch, or maybe one of its dozens of comedy specials. (I do love to laugh, so kudos there, I guess.)

You can improve it by rating stuff, or of course watching more, but being able to sort out this kind of time or event-specific preference is vastly more valuable than anything you might actively tell them. You may call yourself a coffee addict, for instance, but presumably you’re more interested in it at breakfast than when you’re on the way home from the bar. Now, Netflix just knows you like coffee, and will offer it to you whenever you ask them for a drink. Soon, they’ll be able to tell that you really want now is some water — which will make both going to them and clicking on one of their shows all the more attractive.

“Statistically, when you’ve finished a series, the next thing you’ll probably want to watch is a series,” explains Sarandos. “But, at that moment, you probably want to watch a movie. We want these algorithms to get more and more refined and more and more sophisticated, so that it recognizes moods.”

“Over time, it will evolve and be even more sophisticated. So maybe it will consider what time of day you’re watching, what kind of device you’re watching on,” he adds. “You probably do want to watch something different if you’re on an iPad at eight in the morning than if you’re watching television at eight at night. This is all kind of an iteration of the sophisticated merchandising and recommendation.”

This isn’t entirely new in the whole online streaming world, at least if you broaden the horizons a bit. Songza, for instance, was a music service that essentially forced you to pick what you wanted to listen to based on your “mood” — none of that messy “thinking about and specifically choosing something.” It’s a feature, if not quite as prominent, on almost all music services now, and it has popped up now and again on video streaming, too — the recently departed shomi’s graduated genre service was an attempt at this kind of thing.

The trick here is that Netflix will likely keep this all in the background. “What we’re trying to do is work on the personalization experience to put choosing in the background and loving at the front of mind,” as Sarandos explained it. Rather than asking you, it will attempt to understand what you’re in the mood for, give it to you, and it will never even occur to you that you were guided to continue watching, without even so much as a three-day break.

It all sounds a little Black Mirrory, of course, but that is basically just the promise of so much of this deepdive tech data: giving you what you want before you even know you want it. And speaking of wanting, if you understand that Black Mirror reference, you may want to check out Inception — statistically speaking, it’s what you probably want to watch next, anyway.