ALGORITHM NATION
How Netflix plans to keep you glued for even longer
Netflix is notoriously tight-lipped about the data people most want to know about it.
They avoid releasing anything concrete about how many people watch their original productions.
Instead they dump other kinds of information, usually about some funny quirk of how people watch: hey, people usually watch two episodes in one sitting.
I guess if you have a lot of personal worth invested in your style of Netflix watching, these tidbits make sense, although I suspect we’re at least a couple of years away from BuzzFeed quizzes predicting what kind of Netflixer you are or people using phrases like “Four-episodes-a-sitting enthusiast” on their online dating profiles.
The latest bit of info is that people tend to take a break between binging series with a movie or two, and that these movies tend to be pretty predictable based on whatever series they just finished watching.
That, in and of itself, is weird that a (presumably) statistically relevant number of people watch The Princess Bride after gorging on Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, but as a viewer I don’t really know what you do with that information, other than maybe congratulate yourself on being the kind of devil-may-care renegade who watches The Martian after gorging on Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. Keep flying that freak flag high, brother.
What is more interesting is the fact that the average time between finishing one series and then committing to another series is three days.
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-you-can-eat buffet.
Ted Sarandos, chief content officer of Netflix, confirmed this was typical.
“We find that you’re either a very casual user or it’s a part of your daily life,” he said. “And for most of our members, it’s a part of their daily life.”
He said the typical user spent about 70 per cent of their time watching TV and 30 per cent watching movies, a number that holds pretty constant across countries and varied libraries.
So Netflix is basically replacing the TV experience, but with a few more hooks to keep you around for when your stories are finished.
The barb on those hooks, or more specifically how those are about to grow, is the other interesting implication.
At present, Netflix seems to have a basic idea of the type of content you like, and it will give you a couple of those in between suggesting that, despite months of not even so much as slowing your scroll speed as you zip past it, this might finally be the time you decide to watch The Ranch, or maybe one of its dozens of comedy specials.
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 at night. 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 what 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.
“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.
“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 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 Mirror-y, of course, but that is basically just the promise of so much of this deep-dive 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.