Netflix mulls using AI to craft personalized movie trailers for viewers
Researchers at Netflix are experimenting with creating software-edited trailers personalized for individual subscribers to get more peeps to watch its films, according to a well-placed source familiar with the matter. The popular streaming service has over 100 million subscribers across hundreds of countries. It collects …
COMMENTS
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Wednesday 6th December 2017 10:13 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: I know where this is going
sorry, correction! - having checked the link to confirm the methodology, I was somewhat baffled to discover that only one half of each image applied to my original pre-cognitive agreement with your assessment of where it's leading to. Sorry, must go back to that site to carry out further visual experiments. A new hypotheses: perhaps, at some point in the experiment the images converge to come up with what they should have projected originally...
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Wednesday 6th December 2017 13:49 GMT Flakk
Echoing my thoughts. I wonder if my ideal trailer would be something like:
[Black Screen]
[NARRATOR]
From none of the minds that brought you anything associated with any over-flogged Disney properties and starring absolutely no actors that regularly make jackasses out of themselves on Twitter, comes a great new comedy with funny bits that you'll actually need to go to the theater to see.
[Movie Title in Arial Bold Centered on the Black Screen]
[Movie Title Fades, Replaced by Movie Credits]
Call me crazy, I might actually go see that.
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Wednesday 6th December 2017 03:05 GMT ThatOne
Recipe for disaster
> For example, an action movie may be more appealing if the romantic scenes are highlighted for people who watch more romance films or if the scenes containing a preferred actor or actress are included.
Quite true, but the problem will be to assess those preferences... Given the braindead nonsensical "suggestions" I get at all major online stores (like Amazon) (despite having been a customer for up to nearly two decades), I'm ready to bet good money their "personalized" trailers will be a total waste of electrons...
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Wednesday 6th December 2017 07:38 GMT Anonymous Coward
Polishing the turd
So they're going to edit trailers of the straight-to-video junk that makes up so much of their content, in order to make them even less representative of the film and thereby con me into watching something I won't find enjoyable in practice? Only in some marketing drone's mind could that seem like a good plan.
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Wednesday 6th December 2017 08:45 GMT Prst. V.Jeltz
Re: Polishing the turd
Yeah I think i'd prefer a user review / comments / up-down vote type system.
Then again thats what I do with any film I get hold of - just use imdb reviews etc and learn how to read between the lines.
A customised trailer would only work on somneone who watches trailers , I dont as I've long since learned plot points , or "best bits" might well be given away.
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Wednesday 6th December 2017 15:37 GMT Mage
Re: imdb reviews
Amazon bought IMDB and Goodreads. Good USA consumer protection regulation?
Also a good movie or book can get bad reviews because it's marketed wrong, or expectations are wrong. Rubbish can be successful to a mass market. You need to know the biases of the reviewer, which is possible with a regular critic in paper or TV, but impossible with anonymous internet reviews, that might be sock-puppets / bots.
Amazon manages to remove real reviews and leave fake ones on books. Go figure.
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Wednesday 6th December 2017 08:26 GMT Mage
Reinforces bubbles.
So you'll never move outside of watching the sort of thing you have watched.
Ideal for people cowardly doing remakes and sequels and franchises instead of new content. Disastrous for the world's culture.
Ultimately make the platform boring. It will be part of a feedback loop to lowest denominator. Already Netflix is more like a small video library than a streaming service as they drop content, no long tail and promote only that which is already popular.
Amazon and eBay already do this quite well (except it's self defeating the "better" it's done) and it's really stupid and annoying. So actually it doesn't work unless someone that's just bought an electric drill wants another. It's pretty easy if you build decent metadata, starting with genre and description, then studio and cast.
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Wednesday 6th December 2017 12:37 GMT ThaumaTechnician
"They have some odd ideas about what I might like."
No kidding. If you rate a movie/show as "Hated it", you get a new category "Because you liked xxx".
I wish there was a ratings settings of "Jeebus! If you ever suggest a show like this one again, I'm cancelling my subscription!"
Also: provide a switch to stop the frigging' previews. Geeze, Netflix, just because my cursor is stopped on a show in a list ('cuz I'm trying to see who's in it, or I want to check IMDB first), it doesn't mean I want to see the promo.
While I'm at it: there are times that I want to read the credits. Stop minimizing them! Let the members decide...
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Wednesday 6th December 2017 15:40 GMT Mage
re: Let the members decide
There are no netflix members, only customers to be fleeced. Note that subscriptions need to double in price. They don't make a profit at €9.
Subscription anything is a game of lock people in and then you don't care how few gym visits or hours watching they use. Subs only benefit people that binge out every week.
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Wednesday 6th December 2017 11:33 GMT Anonymous Coward
I'd prefer it if they *stopped* using AI or whatever crappy algorithm they currently use to show me their catalogue. Having to depend on 3rd party sites to see the full catalogue is not only annoying, it guarantees that stuff I want to watch keeps getting pulled when nobody watches it (because they never know it's there due to the crap selective display).