Netflix AI Keeps Your Binge Watching

Smit Pujara
Marketing Right Now
3 min readMar 10, 2021

One of the things many of us love about Netflix is its ability to recommend us shows we fall in love with. Netflix has copyrighted a one of a kind AI software that enables personalized streaming experience based on the user watch history and user behavior. Netflix also uses the same AI to produce calculated shows and the success rate of the shows based on consumer behavior on their platform.

Netflix uses this AI as one of their best Marketing Processes by keeping viewers on their platforms for hours if not days by continuously recommending shows to viewers based on their watching history. According to business insider, Netflix users spend an average of 2 hours each day watching shows on their platform. Here are some ways in which Netflix uses AI to make their platform successful:

  1. Personalized Movie Recommendation: With over 7000 shows on Netflix, it’s nearly impossible for users to find shows which they’ll like on their own. Thus, Netflix uses its one of a kind recommendation engine algorithm to help its users find the shows they’ll like. For an instance, if a user has watched The Vampire Diaries, the likelihood of them liking The Originals is very high. The Recommendation engine analyzes the viewing history of other users with similar taste to recommend shows. This way, viewers will already know what they want to watch next in their “recommended for you” section and thus they would continue to pay for their monthly subscription.
  2. Automated Personalized Thumbnails: Netflix also uses AI for click bait strategy by using thousands of video frames from an existing movie or show as a starting point for thumbnail generation, Netflix annotates these images then ranks each image in an effort to identify which thumbnails have the highest likelihood of resulting in your click. Then netflix tests these images on people like you who have similar tastes to pick the best which will make you click on it. According to becoming human, “Nick Nelson, Netflix’s global manager of creative services, explained that the company conducted research in early 2014 that found artwork was “not only the biggest influencer” for a user’s decision about what to watch, it also constituted over 82 percent of their focus while browsing Netflix.”
  3. Movie/Show Production: Netflix also uses AI to calculate and analyze what kind of shows are more popular and trending to create or partner with similar shows. This helps Netflix to keep their viewers engaged with shows that are more popular at the time and thus allowing them to spend more time and money on their platform.

Netflix successfully employs the above mentioned AI techniques to create a solid Marketing Plan. Inspiritai says, Netflix wouldn’t be the service we know and love without their use of data collection and machine learning. The systems are self-supervised, letting them access a much wider range of titles than they would if they were limited to Netflix’s own info.

Netflix has done a phenomenal job of applying AI, data science, and machine learning the “right way” — using a product-based approach that focuses on business need first, then AI solution next, rather than the other way around.

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