Bandersnatch Is Quite A Catch
The Over-the-top (OTT) or Streaming services market is flooded and established players like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video also need to constantly be on their toes and come out with exciting & innovative content more often than they would like. You can read our blog on the hoopla surrounding all the streaming services.
Recently, Netflix came out with an interactive movie called Black Mirror: Bandersnatch. It’s a very unique concept where you can select how the storyline should progress & that will lead up to a different ending based on what choices you make while watching the intuitive movie. Here’s a video by a video game and entertainment media website/ YouTube channel IGN, which talks about how Netflix’s Black Mirror: Bandersnatch is a part video game, part movie experience.
Bandersnatch is unique in a lot of ways, apart from the obvious interactive progression of the movie. The movie is also enabling Netflix to gather more robust pattern discovery and insights into trend analysis than traditional content can. Replacing the more traditional ways of understanding what their audience might like, this way has enabled Netflix to understand real-world decisions like product preference, musical taste, and engagement with human behaviour. A lot of people might not know this, but Netflix has been a data company long before it was a content producer. Its recommendation algorithm is what paved its way towards global expansion. Understanding these user preferences was instrumental in dominating the market it created, keeping subscribers within its ecosystem and guiding original programming slates.
*Minor spoilers ahead*
In Bandersnatch, one of the most important decisions users make is whether games programmer Stefan (Fionn Whitehead) or his associate Colin (Will Poulter) will jump off a balcony. How users handle this decision — how long it took them to make their choice, how often they decided to go back on their decision if allowed a choice to do so — can be matrixed with the choices they make in resulting timelines. Those choices offer unprecedented insight about what Netflix’s subscribers want out of a story and what choices they most want to see characters take.
Bandersnatch allows a new form of data mining that gives Netflix richer, more specific user information than it’s ever had before. This could be used to make different choices in the writers’ room or even in deciding what kind of shows Netflix decides to take beyond the pilot level. Bandersnatch is only the beginning of the data harvesting fest that Netflix is going to unleash in its future productions. This movie offered only two options to its users at a given time, expect Netflix to up their game in the future and offer scenarios with a greater number of choices to understand their user at an even deeper level, and allowing them to make more tailor-made content in the future.
That’s not just it. Netflix is snide enough to market to its users while learning their behaviour, all at the same time. By offering choices like which cereal should the protagonist eat: Frosted Flakes or Sugar Puffs? Or which cassette will he listen to while travelling to the gaming company Tuckersoft: Thompson Twins or Now That’s What I Call Music, Vol. 2.? By putting it in a consumer’s hand, Netflix is not just inviting viewers to set the tone of a scene; it’s asking viewers to pick one product over another. In the process, those viewers are providing clear metrics about their music preferences. Even if they later go back and make a different choice to see whether that has an effect on the story, Netflix still knows the music they prefer.
Bandersnatch is a great example of how technology will shape the way we consume our data and also sheds light on nightmare versions of the way it might be shaped in further.
