Netflix Chief Product Officer Neil Hunt spoke this week at the AMC Conference on Recommender Systems. You can watch the whole thing here:
The video is over two hours long, but GigaOm’s Janko Roettgers pulled some interesting info out of it, including the fact that Netflix is spending $150 million every year on content recommendations. The company also employs as many as 300 people specifically to maintain and improve this part of its business, which it obviously considers to be very important element in keeping subscribers. Roettgers reports:
Hunt explained during his talk that Netflix has a very limited window to convince a customer to watch something. The typical user only looks at the Netflix app one or two minutes, he said, and may browse 20 to 50 titles before either choosing something to watch or giving up entirely and doing something else.
Another interesting tidbit is that Netflix is about to start testing recommendations that take global data into account where it would typically use regional data.
Recommendations aren’t the only thing Netflix is trying to improve when it comes to getting people to find titles that appeal to them. The company has also recently introduced some search improvements.
About a month ago, the company unveiled a new “instant search” feature on its desktop site, which shows cover art for titles as you type. Along with that and an upgrade to its mobile search this week, you can also now search for “Netflix” to quickly access any of the company’s “original” titles.
Image via Netflix
