Data Science and the Art of Producing Entertainment at Netflix
Netflix has released hundreds of Originals and plans to spend $8 billion over the next year on content. Creators of these stories pour their hearts and souls into turning ideas into joy for our viewers. The sublime art of doing this well is hard to describe, but it necessitates a careful orchestration of creative, business and technical decisions. Here we will focus on the latter two — business & technical decisions like planning budgets, finding locations, building sets, and scheduling guest actors that enable the creative act of connecting with viewers.
Each production is a mountain of operational and logistical challenges that consumes and produces tremendous amounts of data. At Netflix’s scale, this is further amplified to levels seldom encountered before in the history of entertainment. This has created opportunities to organize, analyze and model this data that are equally singular in history. This is where data science can aid the art of producing entertainment.
