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Netflix wants to stream to your PS3, Wii and Xbox 360, maybe even iPhone
On Sept 21, 2009, after nearly three years, Netflix announced the winner to its Netflix Prize yesterday. The million dollar prize goes to “BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos”, a team of seven engineers, statisticians and researchers from Austria, Canada, Israel and the U.S.
At the award ceremony,Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said in an interview with Reuters that Netflix plans to send video streams to Sony PlayStation PS3 and Nintendo Wii. Netflix is already streaming videos to Microsoft’s Xbox 260. Hastings said they “want to be on all the game consoles, all the Blu-ray players, all the Internet TVs. So we are working in parallel with all of those efforts. Currently our Xbox deal is exclusive and we haven’t characterized it more than that.”
There are rumors that a Netflix app is already on its way to the App Store. However, when asked, Hastings did not give a timetable and said “we are not focused on mobile yet, but on the TV, on Blu-ray, and on the video game consoles. We will get to mobile eventually, including the iPhone.”
Netflix also announced Netflix Prize 2 at the award ceremony. It will focus more on helping customers early in their experience with Netflix, drawing on many more sources of data to try to find just the right movies.
Background:
More than 51,000 people worldwide competed for the $1 million Netflix prize for three years, trying to improve the accuracy for predicting what movie a person may like to watch based on what movies he liked in the past and what movies people with similar tastes liked in the past. Netflix said that the winning solution will make the movie predictions twice as good as before.
Bellkor used matrix factorization models for their algorithm. This winning shows that matrix factorization models are superior to classic nearest-neighbor techniques for producing product recommendations, allowing the incorporation of additional information such as implicit feedback, temporal effects, and confidence levels.
Yep, Netflix would definitely be wise to broaden their horizons once their MS exclusivity contract is expired. It has a really good potential of increasing netflix subscribership even more.
I do wonder how 360 fans will react once this happens tho. I’m pretty sure most won’t care, but when you think about how Wii and PS3, who doesn’t require a subscription fee to stream Netflix while Netflix is only available to 360 owners with an XBL Gold membership, I could think of a few 360 owners who’ll feel a bit pissed if this happened.
Of course if you live outside the U.S as I do (Toronto , Canada) – there is no movie service on the ps3 and no netflix on xbox.
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