How Netflix cracked the formula for hit shows

I'm a sucker for comics. Specifically super hero comics. And, after seeing Netflix's Daredevil, I was taken by how accurate and well done it is. It's one of the best adaptations I've seen to a comic series. Fast paced, good action, just blunt and dark enough.

That got me thinking - How the hell did they do that? After "Orange is the new black" and "House of cards", Netflix seem to be churning out great TV, again and again.

The answer is simple. Netflix, which started as a mail rental service (Just because broadband infrastructure wasn't relevant back then) and moved on to online video rental, simply know exactly what we want as viewers.
They know which movies we like.
Which movies we watch until the end, and which movies we "break" in the middle.
They also know which scenes we run over and over again.

By tagging every scene in every content, they have the ability to create the perfect show for each one of their viewers. They can actually make script decisions (Exactly how the story will be built) according to data.

Furthermore - In the future, story would not be linear as we know it, but every subscriber will get his own, personal, customised version of the show. Yoni Bloch's Interlude might actually close this gap from the production end.

That's pretty amazing.

Clear off the table

[ taking some time off the ongoing mysql->mongo series ]

Been visualising data a lot lately.
Scatter charts, realtime indicators, good ol' line charts and, of course, tables.
It's really easy to fill the screen with loads of information, screaming colours and as many numbers floating around the screen. This makes orientation difficult for the user, especially non-technical users.

Some of our users simply need insights and recommendations, but need the graphs for credibility.

This is a great post from darkhorseanalytics explaining how a good table looks like. [hint - not your good ol' office 1998 excel highlight table]

http://darkhorseanalytics.com/blog/clear-off-the-table/

The untapped computing power

Now that cloud computing has taken over the web, it's time to think what would be the next step. Considering that the cloud providers are making money out of renting CPUs and storage. But there's already a lot of CPU power and storage connected to the web, and not being used most of the day.

This thought kind of takes me back to a '97 project called seti@home. That project used home PCs to parallel process radio signals from space. And though users didn't gain much from this project except for a thank you mail, times have changed since.

My wife, who has a day job, has a PC connected to the internet, operating all of the day. Imagine you can rent your computer for processing power or storage. Such network infrastructure already exists, and it would be pretty simple to install a client which receives jobs or lends storage for a cloud based network. As most search/ image processing/ big data analysis engines use map reduce and distributed storage nodes, such a network could provide a reliable, viable alternative to current cloud providers.

Been doing a lot of thinking about this lately. Who wants to join me and implement such a network?