Metadata,TV content, and competitive advantage

Just sharing this article from The Atlantic with you. It is specific to
video, but could pertain to creating vocabularies for all types of content
online. 

Marilyn  Siderwicz

W3C Marketing and Communications Strategist

msiderwicz@w3.org

How Netflix Reverse Engineered Hollywood

To understand how people look for movies, the video service created 76,897
micro-genres. We took the genre descriptions, analyzed them, . and built our
own genre generator. 

Alexis C. Madrigal <http://www.theatlantic.com/alexis-madrigal/>  Jan 2 2014

 

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/01/how-netflix-reverse-en
gineered-hollywood/282679/

 

[[snip

Netflix possesses a stockpile of data about Hollywood entertainment that is
absolutely unprecedented.

.Using large teams of people specially trained to watch movies, Netflix
deconstructed Hollywood. They paid people to watch films and tag them with
all kinds of metadata. This process is so sophisticated and precise that
taggers receive a 36-page training document that teaches them how to rate
movies on their sexually suggestive content, goriness, romance levels, and
even narrative elements like plot conclusiveness.

 

They capture dozens of different movie attributes. They even rate the moral
status of characters. When these tags are combined with millions of users
viewing habits, they become Netflix's competitive advantage. The company's
main goal as a business is to gain and retain subscribers. And the genres
that it displays to people are a key part of that strategy.]]

 

And also.

 

[[As a thought experiment: Imagine if Facebook broke down individual
websites according to a 36-page tagging document that let the company truly
understand what it was people liked about Atlantic or Popular Science or
4chan or ViralNova? 

 

It might be impossible with web content. But if Netflix's system didn't
already exist, most people would probably say that it couldn't exist
either.]]

 

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Marilyn Siderwicz

World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)

Marketing and Communications Strategist

617.258.5263

msiderwicz@w3.org

www.w3.org <http://www.w3.org/> 

 

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