James Delahunty
21 Sep 2009 22:50
Netflix has paid out a $1 million reward to a seven-member international research group after the group won a contest held by Netflix to improve its predictions of movies a customer might like to view. The contest was launched in 2006 and witnessed 51,000 contestants from 186 countries participate ever since.
"I was stunned at how the Netflix Prize created its own economy of researchers competing and collaborating," Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said. BellKor's Pragmatic Chaos, the winning team, had improved Netflix movie recommendations success by more than 10 percent to claim the prize.
Technically however, it had drawn with a rival group called the Ensemble at a 10.6 percent improvement, but it was declared the winner at an awards ceremony on Monday because it submitted its final entry just a few minutes before Ensemble managed to.
Netflix has more than 100,000 films and TV shows available, so making improvements to its recommendation system is far from easy, but will undoubtedly result in long-term revenue gains that easily surpass $1 million.
Paying out $1 million shows how important it is for the company to make sure customers keep on coming back and selecting more movies, and keep paying for the service, as does Netflix' intention to hold a second contest.