1. Netflix is over 20 years old! It was founded in 1997 and launched its DVD rental and sales website in 1998. Streaming wasn’t introduced until 2007.
2. In 2006, Netflix offered a $1 million prize to whoever could increase the accuracy of their recommendation system by 10%.
3. The prize was awarded in 2009, but they never implemented the winning solution due to a combination of reasons.
4. Today, Netflix boasts 125 million subscribers and is available in over 190 countries.
5. In 2013, Netflix had five original series. This year, they’ll have roughly 700 original TV shows in their catalog.
6. On top of that, they have plans to release 80 original films in 2018.
7. As of January of this year, there were still 3.4 million people subscribed to their DVD service.
8. A specific team of Netflix employees analyze and tag every movie and TV series with metadata such as who directed it, the actors, the location, and even an overall romance rating.
9. These tags help create the highly-specific genres users might see on their homepage, which there are over 76,000 of.
10. Netflix collects data on what a user watches, when they watch, what device they watch on, what they search, and what they rate, all in the name of how they can best customize the user’s experience.
11. The titles and genres a user sees, the order of those genre rows, and the order of the titles within those rows are all determined by algorithms that try to predict what a user is most likely to press play on.
12. Turns out that 80% of the TV shows people watch on Netflix are discovered through the recommendation system.
13. Recommendations are also based on which taste communities (groups of people who watch similar content) a user belongs to. There are over 2,000 taste communities and every user fits into three or four of them.
14. It’s not just the content and genres that are customized, but also the trailers and the thumbnail images a user sees.
15. Netflix users watch over 140 million hours of content a day.
16. The most popular day to watch Netflix in 2017 was January 1.
17. Netflix members watched an average of 60 movies in 2017.
18. Netflix has found that viewers rarely get hooked after the first episode of a season. For example, it wasn’t until the 8th episode of How I Met Your Mother that 70% of viewers went on to complete the entire season.
19. 8.4 million Netflix members have finished an entire season of a show within 24 hours of its release.
20. The Crown is rumored to be the most expensive TV show ever made, apparently costing Netflix $156 million for two seasons.
21. Within 30 days of its release, Adam Sandler’s The Ridiculous 6 became the most-watched movie in Netflix history.
