Claire Brownell
The Vancouver Sun
Drawing on the power of Netflix Inc.’s global programming database could give the company’s new recommendation algorithms an advantage over Canadian competitors shomi and CraveTV when it comes to keeping viewers paying the monthly subscription fee.
On Wednesday morning, Netflix’s vice-president of product innovation Carlos Gomez-Uribe revealed the company has changed the algorithms that recommend what viewers should watch next. Instead of making recommendations based on regional models, Netflix now analyzes the types of videos a customer likes to watch and looks to other users with similar tastes around the world — presenting recommendations based on what’s popular with members of that fan community regardless of where they live.
Gomez-Uribe said the new algorithms are so good at personalizing recommendations, they’ve established that there’s a global community of people who like to watch movies with talking horses that’s distinct from the community that likes to watch movies with talking dogs. “It’s pretty funny. It’s not a level of detail we had before,” he said in an interview.
In contrast, both shomi — a video streaming service jointly owned by Rogers Communications Inc. and Shaw Communications Inc. — and Bell Media’s CraveTV tout the human touch their recommendations offer.
Mike Cosentino, senior vice-president of programming at CraveTV, said its service “features human curation for Canadians by real Canadian TV programming experts,” while shomi uses “a marriage of human curation and technical algorithm (to ensure) members discover new and unique content that is of interest to them but not limited to the boundaries of their profile,” said Anne Tebo, senior director of customer experience and insights.
Asked if Netflix’s new global algorithms can beat a human’s suggestions, Gomez-Uribe laughed. “Any day,” he said.
Canadian subscribers may still not be able to watch American Horror Story, for example, but Netflix is getting better at telling Canadian horror fans what else they might be interested in that’s legally licensed for them to watch.
On January 14, Netflix announced it would take steps to make it more difficult to access Netflix shows and movies that aren’t licensed for viewing in a customer’s place of residence by using services that obscure a computer’s location.
As many as one-third of Canadian Netflix subscribers use virtual private networks to watch videos available to our U.S. neighbours, according to some estimates.
Alan Wolk, a senior analyst at media consulting firm Diffusion Group and author of Over The Top: How The Internet Is (Slowly But Surely) Changing The Television Industry, said good recommendations are valuable to streaming services because they keep viewers engaged by constantly offering up new videos they want to watch. And happy and engaged customers are less likely to cancel their subscriptions, he said.
The downside is the loss of “serendipity,” Wolk said. Netflix might know that a viewer who’s watched three animated movies with talking horses is likely to be interested in a fourth, but that same viewer might have expanded his taste horizons had something else been offered.
“Sometimes we stumble upon something that’s completely unlike anything you’ve ever watched before,” Wolk said. “That’s something unfortunate that we’re losing.”
Algorithms that cater to niche global tastes offer both advantages and disadvantages to Canadian filmmakers. Netflix’s new global algorithms mean a Canadian who has never shown any interest in Canadian film could be less likely to receive a recommendation to watch one, but an American who loves whodunits could be more likely to receive a recommendation for, say, CBC’s Murdoch Mysteries.
The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission relaxed the Canadian content quotas that broadcasters must meet last March in response to increased competition from Netflix. It also decided against requiring the U.S.-based company to pay into a Canadian content fund.
Gomez-Uribe said Netflix’s new recommendation algorithms should increase exposure to Canadian films and television shows by suggesting them to people who are more likely to actually watch them.
“You’ll have many more people across the entire world watching Canadian productions,” he said.
© 2016 National Post