FeedFliks' motto is "Get your money's worth from Netflix" and it comes with a variety of tracking tools to help you do just that. Josh Lowensohn covered this start-up a little more than a year ago, but since then FeedFliks has taken advantage of Netflix's API to build out an even more impressive set of features. FeedFliks allows you to see how long you have movies checked out, what your cost per movie is, as well as optimize your queue.
FeedFliks shows me that I've been neglecting my Netflix account.
(Credit: Screenshot by Harrison Hoffman/CNET)In its early days, FeedFliks used your Netflix RSS feed to pull its information, but the introduction of the Netflix API allowed it to connect your account with Netflix in order to pull data. This gives the site access to your entire renting history so that it can analyze your watching behavior. One product of the analysis is that it presents you with a pie chart of how long you usually have movies out for and compares it to all of the users who have plugged into FeedFliks. Your cost per movie is also calculated so that you can gauge if a subscription is worth it. FeedFliks is packed with these interesting statistics on your Netflix usage. To try to avoid having a movie out for too long, you can have FeedFliks send you an alert to return it.
The "vital statistics" for my Netflix account.
(Credit: Screenshot by Harrison Hoffman/CNET)One of the most interesting features that FeedFliks has is that it can analyze your queue and tell you which movies should be higher up. It uses Netflix's personalized ratings for you in order to determine what you will likely enjoy the most. If you have a 5 star recommendation buried at number 200, then you probably won't ever get to it. FeedFliks will help bring that to your attention so you can enjoy a killer movie.. Hopefully once Netflix implements its million dollar recommendation algorithm this analysis will be even more helpful and accurate.
Finally, FeedFliks has implemented a sort of advanced search, which is currently something that Netflix lacks. For example, on FeedFliks, you can sort for a comedy, made between 1970 and 1985 that has at least a 3.5-star rating. This could be pretty useful if you're looking for a specific movie that you can't quite put your finger on, or if you're just interested in discovering new ones.
FeedFliks presents a lot of useful statistics relating to your Netflix account. Seeing all of these numbers laid out for you can be very useful in figuring out how to get the most out of your account. I would dub it "Mint.com for Netflix." The functionality is there, so if they work on the presentation of the site some, it would have a legitimate chance of making it as a mainstream service.
Three years ago, Netflix announced that it would give $1 million to whoever could improve its recommendation algorithm, Cinematch, by 10 percent accuracy. Called the Netflix Prize, its difficulty had become infamous. Now, a team has finally accomplished the seemingly impossible feat--well, two teams actually.
After three years of competing, BellKor's Pragmatic Chaos submitted its winning algorithm only 24 minutes before another team, The Ensemble, submitted its own showing 10 percent improvement. In fact, the accuracy of the two submissions were identical, so BellKor was awarded the $1 million prize for being first. BellKor's Pragmatic Chaos is made up of seven members, including two AT&T researchers.
(Credit:
Netflix)
Given the success of this first competition, Netflix has set its sights on an even more difficult task for its sophomore effort. While the first competition focused on predicting which movies people would like from a set of sample user ratings, this one asks teams to predict based on demographic and behavioral data. Netflix says that it will provide teams with over 100 million data points, including age, gender, ZIP code, and previously rented movies. Unlike the original competition, this one is time-based, with $500,000 being awarded to the team who comes in first after six months and $500,000 being awarded to the team in the lead after 18 months, at the end of the contest.
From the looks of the new Netflix Prize competition, we should see some great advances in behavioral research. The task in this competition appears to be much harder than the one in the original competition, so it will be interesting to see what sort of progress the teams can make in 18 months.
Men in Black playing on Joost's new iPhone app.
If ever there was a Web service that experienced a rapid fall from grace, it was online video start-up Joost. What started out as a much anticipated new service ultimately fell short of expectations and has recently struggled for attention. Friday, Joost released an iPhone app for its service that might be a game changer. Joost's iPhone app lets users stream and watch any of Joost's 46,000-plus videos for free.
Say what you will about Joost's library of content, the concept behind this app is fantastic. The ability to stream a movie, TV show, or other piece of video content on the go is great. I know the technology is nothing revolutionary--after all the iPhone has had a YouTube app, complete with streaming video, since the device launched. Even given that, when you load up Men in Black on Joost, it just feels like a whole different ballgame. This isn't a video of a dog on a skateboard anymore. This is real, Hollywood-produced content, delivered to your phone, for free.
I have not experienced the major hiccups that very early users, like MG Siegler did, so those issues seem to have been taken care of. I did notice some occassional stuttering of the stream over Wi-Fi. I am, however, disheartened by the lack of streaming support over EDGE or 3G. Joost requires a Wi-Fi connection to work.
Even though Joost appears to have a really slick UI (in many ways it does), it breaks some of the conventions for UI design set forth by Apple. Flicking to view the next page of search results does work. However, it does not slide over as you would expect, rather a spinning wheel is displayed while the next page loads. Joost also did not implement the incremental find that we have all grown accustomed to for searching.
For me, Joost's iPhone app falls just short of greatness. I really like what they are going for here, but I would certainly like to see more content added to Joost's library and support for 3G at the very least, if not EDGE. Even though the videos appear to choke at times, even over Wi-Fi, 3G should be more than capable of streaming video.
I hope that Hulu and Netflix, with their expansive content libraries, are paying attention to what Joost is doing because they are both prime candidates for this sort of mobile application. I get excited just thinking about having access to all of those videos (almost) anytime I want.
Update:
Netflix is calling this a "soft launch" since it is only rolling out such a small number of videos for HD streaming. The move mostly serves to stake a claim in the HD streaming market as opposed to being a full offering.
Contrary to what others are reporting, HD streaming will be available on all streaming devices eventually. That means the Roku, LG, and Samsung boxes will all be able to stream these HD movies movies at some point after the feature is available on the Xbox 360. The PC- and Mac-based versions of Netflix, will not, however, be able to stream HD immediately. In addition, streaming in HD will require a large amount of bandwidth. Netflix estimates the requirement being in the 8-10 Mbps range.
We already knew that Netflix streaming was going to be included in Microsoft's "New Xbox Experience," launching for the Xbox 360 on November 19, but Netflix had a little surprise in store for us today. In addition to its catalog of over 12,000 titles that will be available for near-DVD quality streaming, Netflix will stream 300 titles in HD to the Xbox 360.
This is the beginning of the dream that we talked about when Netflix gave its subscribers unlimited watching time, back in January. Even though 300 titles is a very small portion of Netflix's entire catalog, at some point, we can assume that Netflix will offer most of its catalog for streaming at some point and even further down the road, most of its catalog in HD. While browser-based streaming is great, with great set-top boxes, like the $100 Roku and now the Xbox 360, Netflix is slowly but surely invading living rooms across the country and making it easier to stream its content.
In order to take advantage of Netflix streaming on the Xbox 360, you must be an Xbox Live Gold member. Again, Netflix HD streaming will go live on the New Xbox Experience, which launches on November 19.
Update October 1, 4:20 a.m. PDT: Netflix has officially announced the partnership, and says that the first 1,000 or so Starz titles are now available.
A major complaint with Netflix's current selection of streaming movies and shows available through its "Watch Now" service is that it doesn't contain enough recent titles. Now, according to several reports online, it looks as though Netflix is looking to change that.
On Wednesday, the company plans to announce a new partnership with Starz to offer subscribers 2,500 additional movies from Starz Play. Starz Play's selection includes current hits such as No Country for Old Men, Superbad, and Ratatouille, as well as indie films, concerts, and classic movies. The first 1,000 of those movies, added to Netflix's current offering of 12,000, should, supposedly, be available immediately, but they are not available on Netflix's site yet. Expect the update to come sometime on Wednesday.
This is big news for Netflix, which has been struggling to sign studios up to make their new releases available for instant watching. In terms of new releases, this deal gets Netflix one step closer to being on the same level as the on-demand offerings from Comcast and Verizon. Netflix's overall library, however, goes deeper than Comcast's or Verizon's because it offers many classics on top of these newly added new releases. Additionally, this deal allows subscribers to stream the Starz TV network on their PCs.
The best part of this news, for Netflix subscribers, is that all of this extra content isn't going to cost them a dime. All Netflix subscribers with unlimited subscriptions (those $8.99 and up) will have access to the Starz Play selections. When you pair this news with this summer's release of Roku's killer set-top box for Netflix and this fall's Xbox 360 dashboard update, which will enable Netflix streaming, Netflix's service is looking more attractive every day.
Netflix's recommendation engine is the centerpiece of this new design. Netflix now breaks down recommendations by categories and lists the source movies for these recommendations. As you can see in the screenshot below, Netflix is recommending movies by Stanley Kubrick (who happens to be one of my favorite directors) to me because I liked Dr. Strangelove and Full Metal Jacket. Perhaps a more impressive set of recommendations is made up of "Dramas Based on Contemporary Literature," as a result of my interest in No Country for Old Men and Big Fish.
Other information making an appearance is your recent rental activity and a single movie recommendation on the top. I think that this update is looking really good. What do the Netflix subscribers out there think?
Being a Netflix subscriber, I've been checking the site all day to see if it is back up and running. There has been coverage of this problem throughout the day and the site is finally back up, but I have noticed a fairly glaring problem: Netflix's movie ratings are broken.
Rating movies is one of Netflix's main features, and there are no doubt some confused users on the site right now. Multiple sources have confirmed the inability to rate movies. This is probably a glitch left over from the outage.
As you can see in this screenshot, there are no stars for rating anywhere to be seen. I'm sure that Netflix will be correcting this problem shortly, but I just wanted to point it out in the meantime.
UPDATE: Netflix made its official announcement on Monday morning.
In an attempt to counteract whatever announcements Apple will make at Macworld this week, Netflix has decided to let subscribers stream unlimited movies and TV shows, with almost every basic plan, the Associated Press is reporting.
Currently, subscribers can watch anywhere from 5 to 48 hours a month, depending on their plan, although I don't see how anyone could be on the "eight-at-a-time" plan. (My two-at-a time plan came with 14 hours.)
The new, unlimited plan will be available to all subscribers, except for those on the two-rentals-per-month plan.
Even though we knew this was coming, it is still big news. We are so close to the large-scale broadband video revolution, I can almost taste it. With download speeds increasing and the promise of Netflix-enabled set-top boxes, we are almost there. I can't envision many better scenarios than having Netflix's entire catalog available for watching on my TV instantly.
Apple is expected to announce its own movie rental service on Monday--but with a pay-per-movie model as opposed to a subscription-based one like Netflix's.
I personally like Netflix's model better. But then again, Apple used the same strategy in music, and it has worked out pretty well so far. With all of these recent developments looking so promising, someone is going to have to break the news to Sony that all of this fuss over Blu-ray isn't going to matter in a year or two.
As we have seen, Netflix and NBC have a very solid working relationship, offering exclusive web content for the site in the past. Today, Netflix announced that it will offer episodes of hit NBC shows, such as Heroes, The Office, 30 Rock, and Friday Night Lights to its subscribers for instant viewing online.
Just to clarify, Netflix has offered instant viewing of various DVDs, including Heroes Season 1, prior to today, but now it will be making episodes that are currently unavailable on DVD available for viewing. This also marks the fourth way that you can see NBC shows online. NBC currently offers its shows on Hulu, NBC.com, NBC Direct, and now Netflix. It's nice to see that NBC is really forward thinking about Web distribution, now hopefully the Writer's Guild can get the strike settled so that they will be compensated for this content.
The true value in having a library of movies as large as Netflix's is being able to discover movies that you might like, but that you had not previously heard of. Of course, Netflix already offers an extensive recommendation engine which deals out great movie suggestions, but Netflix takes discovery a step further. Netflix has always allowed you to see the movie reviews of those who you have designated as Friends, but it wasn't until recently that they found a good way to find Friends.
Netflix's major community update includes some really useful features, the first of which is called Latest Reviews. Latest Reviews allows you to see a live, rolling list of the most current reviews being posted by Netflix users, right on the community page. The list of the latest reviews includes information on who posted it and how similar they are to you, based on your previous ratings and reviews. The hope is that, when you see a good review roll down and you are very similar to the reviewer, you will add that movie to your queue.
To the right of Latest Reviews is a random selection of lists that people have saved. This module includes lists such as "Top British Comedies of All Time" and "War--What's it good for?" This is definitely a unique way to find very specific types of movies.
I really applaud Netflix for listening so much to what their customers have to say and actually acting on that. If trusting other people directly really isn't your thing, there is always hope for the future of recommendations with the Netflix Prize. The challenge there is for someone to create a recommendation engine that improves on Netflix's current engine by 10%. The current leader in the contest has achieved an improvement of 7.80% over Netflix's engine. That's impressive enough, but they still have a little bit of work to do before they can claim the 1 million dollar prize. Take notes Blockbuster, this is how you build a community of passionate and loyal customers.
