![]() ![]() Using large teams of people specially trained to watch movies, Netflix deconstructed Hollywood. If we reverse-engineered Yellin’s system, it was Yellin himself who imagined a much more ambitious reverse-engineering process. Netflix possesses a stockpile of data about Hollywood entertainment that is absolutely unprecedented. Georgia Tech professor and Atlantic contributing editor, Ian Bogost, worked closely with me recreating the Netflix grammar, and he programmed the magical genre generator above. ![]() Netflix cooperated with my quest to understand what they internally call "altgenres," and made VP of product innovation Todd Yellin, the man who conceived of the system, available for an in-depth interview. The genres that I scraped and that we caricature above are just the surface manifestation of this deeper database. ![]() ![]() They possess a stockpile of data about Hollywood entertainment that is absolutely unprecedented. What emerged from the work is this conclusion: Netflix has meticulously analyzed and tagged every movie and TV show imaginable. To my (and Netflix's) knowledge, no one outside the company has ever assembled this data before. We've broken down its most popular descriptions, and counted its most popular actors and directors. We've now spent several weeks understanding, analyzing, and reverse-engineering how Netflix's vocabulary and grammar work. There are so many that just loading, copying, and pasting all of them took the little script I wrote more than 20 hours. Through a combination of elbow grease and spam-level repetition, we discovered that Netflix possesses not several hundred genres, or even several thousand, but 76,897 unique ways to describe types of movies. This idle wonder turned to rabid fascination when I realized that I could capture each and every microgenre that Netflix's algorithm has ever created. If Netflix can show such tiny slices of cinema to any given user, and they have 40 million users, how vast did their set of "personalized genres" need to be to describe the entire Hollywood universe? Emotional Fight-the-System Documentaries? Period Pieces About Royalty Based on Real Life? Foreign Satanic Stories from the 1980s? Some of them just seem so specific that it's absurd. If you use Netflix, you've probably wondered about the specific genres that it suggests to you. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |