Behind the new shows lies Netflix's real innovation – its recommendation technology. Using a customer's history, Netflix tailors its library into an estimated 79,000 "microgenres" – Oscar-winning Romantic Movies about Marriage, Gritty Suspenseful Revenge Westerns, Evil Kid Horror Movies – you watch it, they categorise it. "The whole service acts as a filter," says Syfret. In a world where there are too many choices, Netflix offers a solution.
Netflix is a tech company first and a media company second. Founder Reed Hastings studied maths and later artificial intelligence at Bowdoin College in Maine. The company employs people to tag movies with metadata.
Before they can start, they have to absorb a 36-page training document that sets out how to rate movies on categories from gore and sexual content to romance and even narrative elements like plot conclusiveness and the moral status of characters. Combine that with the data viewers provide and Netflix is certainly creating the most powerful movies database the world has ever seen.
