Netflix Experts

[TheConfessor]

Today's Experts on WWTBAM were two Netflix employees who professed to lead the team that screens movies all day to determine which ones Netflix should offer to its customers. Does that make any sense? Isn't the whole Netflix business model based on having essentially every movie ever made available on DVD in its inventory, so the customers can decide what they want to watch and add those titles to their cue? Why would Netflix have a bunch of paid employees whose only job is to watch movies, if they're going to offer access to every mainstream movie anyway?

[Bob Juch]

Today's Experts on WWTBAM were two Netflix employees who professed to lead the team that screens movies all day to determine which ones Netflix should offer to its customers. Does that make any sense? Isn't the whole Netflix business model based on having essentially every movie ever made available on DVD in its inventory, so the customers can decide what they want to watch and add those titles to their cue? Why would Netflix have a bunch of paid employees whose only job is to watch movies, if they're going to offer access to every mainstream movie anyway?

I suppose they decide which of the non-mainstream ones to carry.

[Ritterskoop]

They have gobs of indie and foreign movies, which I guess someone screens.

Also, it might be that they are the people who set up and maintain the recommendation tools, so that if you rate all the Die Hard movies highly, the recommender suggests you check out the Mel Gibson cop movies. Or like that. That would be a fun job.

[TheConfessor]

Today's Experts on WWTBAM were two Netflix employees who professed to lead the team that screens movies all day to determine which ones Netflix should offer to its customers. Does that make any sense? Isn't the whole Netflix business model based on having essentially every movie ever made available on DVD in its inventory, so the customers can decide what they want to watch and add those titles to their cue? Why would Netflix have a bunch of paid employees whose only job is to watch movies, if they're going to offer access to every mainstream movie anyway?

I suppose they decide which of the non-mainstream ones to carry.

I'm not a Netflix subscriber, but I was under the impression that they carried nearly everything. And if they only screen the non-mainstream ones, that wouldn't be much help in answering questions that would be asked by WWTBAM.

I just noticed that I spelled the term for requested flicks "cue," but on second thought, I imagine it's spelled "queue." I've only heard people say it, so I don't know which spelling Netflix uses.

[KillerTomato]

It's "queue" on both Netflix and Blockbuster online.

I think what the team does is decide how MANY of each title to purchase so that they maximize the number of rentals per copy, while ensuring that no one has to wait TOO long for any particular title. They forecast how popular a title will be.

[silverscreenselect]

There are dozens of companies that specialize in foreign, independent, public domain, and other obscure titles, a lot of which are essentially home and student movies reduced to DVD. These outfits undoubtedly supply Netflix with catalogues of their "inventory" and Netflix would have to do some amount of editorial decision making to avoid just being a sucker for anything that someone makes a DVD out of.