Netflix paid one million for a recommendation
What’s this program and why Netflix paid one million dollars for a recommendation ? In 2006, Netflix announced the Netflix Prize, a machine learning and data mining competition for movie rating prediction. They also offered $1 million dollars to whoever improved the accuracy of their existing system called Cinematch by 10%. This paid was awarded to a team called “BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos” in 2009. With this algorithm of this team, was found to be 10% more effect than Netflix’s own recommendation service, however the company never implemented the team’s solution into its own service. “We evaluated some of the new methods offline but the additional accuracy gains that we measured did not seem to justify the engineering effort needed to bring them into a production environment,” Netflix finally explained in a recent blog post. “Also, our focus on improving Netflix personalization had shifted to the next level by then.” The company said because the majority its users were streaming videos rather than renting DVDs, it wasn’t logical to integrate the algorithm into its recommendation service, which is different for its streaming service and DVD rental program.
