Content discovery challenges are forcing the average consumer to spend 10.5 minutes finding something to watch each time they access their streaming services according to Nielsen
I think it depends on how much of the content you have already watched. I’ve personally watched a lot of Netflix in the past year and it keeps suggesting stuff to me that I’ve already watched. And I don’t mean the “watch again” category. Literally every category on the main page contains stuff I’ve already watched recently and rated.
I also rate every title I watch, in hope of feeding the algorithm. It does offer me new releases which fit, but anything older is completely hidden behind recommendations that never really change (no way to hide away content i don’t want to watch).
I get your point about it being good to guide people towards things they might like, but evidently from the article we are commenting on it’s not really helping on the whole.
I’m just saying the study is a bit flawed in that before we zapped channels but it didn’t take that long to go through the list and then you either picked something or didn’t watch. Going through all streaming services and the content they have takes far longer. It’s a bit like saying people spend far more time in their car after moving to the suburbs. Sure they can work remotely or in the suburbs but they can also work in the city, which is far likely than the reverse of city people working in the suburbs. Not a very good analogy, could probably come up with a better one, but I’m simply saying it’s a lot easier to waste time browsing now.
To continue on the zapping comparison the algorithm in that situation would put the channels you normally watch first. It wouldn’t stop you from zapping through all of them but in many cases it would reduce the number of channels you zap through. Same thing here, if you’re looking for something matching your regular pattern the algorithm reduces the time to pick, but if you want something different it doesn’t help and we’re back to a problem of how to make a catalog of 1000 movies “perusable” with a remote.
I think it depends on how much of the content you have already watched. I’ve personally watched a lot of Netflix in the past year and it keeps suggesting stuff to me that I’ve already watched. And I don’t mean the “watch again” category. Literally every category on the main page contains stuff I’ve already watched recently and rated.
I also rate every title I watch, in hope of feeding the algorithm. It does offer me new releases which fit, but anything older is completely hidden behind recommendations that never really change (no way to hide away content i don’t want to watch).
I get your point about it being good to guide people towards things they might like, but evidently from the article we are commenting on it’s not really helping on the whole.
I’m just saying the study is a bit flawed in that before we zapped channels but it didn’t take that long to go through the list and then you either picked something or didn’t watch. Going through all streaming services and the content they have takes far longer. It’s a bit like saying people spend far more time in their car after moving to the suburbs. Sure they can work remotely or in the suburbs but they can also work in the city, which is far likely than the reverse of city people working in the suburbs. Not a very good analogy, could probably come up with a better one, but I’m simply saying it’s a lot easier to waste time browsing now.
To continue on the zapping comparison the algorithm in that situation would put the channels you normally watch first. It wouldn’t stop you from zapping through all of them but in many cases it would reduce the number of channels you zap through. Same thing here, if you’re looking for something matching your regular pattern the algorithm reduces the time to pick, but if you want something different it doesn’t help and we’re back to a problem of how to make a catalog of 1000 movies “perusable” with a remote.