Netflix: Using AI To Give Us Better Entertainment

The hooking experience that gets users to binge-watch series and seamless experience that makes them come back for more. Netflix has been able to achieve this feat by heavily using AI. On 7 January 2018 alone, its viewers set a record by streaming 350 million hours of content in one day! Let’s look at how AI is playing the magic behind-the-scenes of this streaming giant.

Personalized movies recommendations

The recommendations that pop up immediately after a movie or show finishes, the content that appears on the Home page when we login to Netflix, those are all recommendation experiences powered by machine learning algorithms.

Netflix started with humble beginnings; initially, their methodologies were very simple. Movies and shows were recommended just based on ratings from user feedback, number of views, whether videos were being watched in their entirety, parts, and/or IMDB ratings. However, they have come a long way into building highly accurate models to predict what the user’s next favorite unwatched movie could be.

Today these recommendations consider contextual information to find the perfect recommendation for each user at that particular moment in time, and they also make use of the assumption ...