How useful was the Netflix Prize challenge for Netflix?

Re:How useful was the Netflix Prize challenge for Netflix? by szszrk on Wednesday July 07, 2021 @03:46AM (#27758471)

To their defense - their catalog in some countries (like mine) is so small that I was able to just ... browse through the whole offer in 10 minutes.

I've managed to binge-watch everything I liked in two months (while working full time remotely) and cancel Prime.

With such a small catalog suggestions will mostly be wrong, as there isn't enough content to fill the whole suggestions tab :)

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Re:How useful was the Netflix Prize challenge for Netflix? by TeMPOraL on Wednesday July 07, 2021 @04:31AM (#27758759)

Which makes you wonder why they even bother with suggestions in the first place, instead of doing the obvious thing: giving you a searchable list of all movies they have for your region.

Given that the former is a major engineering project, while the latter is a junior-level interview question, one has to assume they're trying to confuse their users on purpose.

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Re:How useful was the Netflix Prize challenge for Netflix? by disgruntledphd2 on Wednesday July 07, 2021 @08:35AM (#27760372)

Nah, it's presumably because they just lift and shift the US code to whatever new region they're in, without actually investing any thought into it.

This is a recurrent problem with US based services, as residents of the USA tend to forget that they are a very large country.

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