Netflix is spending $7 billion on content next year–content that’s been shaped largely by Netflix’s own data on what people like to watch. And of course, Netflix will ensure you see the content you’re most interested in, because each person’s queue is shaped by the company’s habit-tracking algorithms.
But in fact, Netflix’s extreme personalization goes even deeper than that. According to a new post by Netflix itself, the company goes so far as to customize the artwork you see for films and shows based upon what you’ve clicked in the past. Yes, that means that you and I may see at least nine different permutations of a cover for Stranger Things, simply based upon our viewing habits.
In another example, an Uma Thurman fan is served the most iconic cover of Pulp Fiction, in which the actress is laying on her stomach, smoking a cigarette. But what about someone else who’s watched a lot of John Travolta movies? They’ll see an alternative cover featuring him instead. It’s entirely unrecognizable as the film Pulp Fiction, but it is most certainly Travolta.
It’s an interesting phenomenon that probably isn’t so surprising to those of us who use the service, given that covers seem to change frequently in general. But a skeptic might point out that, while Netflix claims to be customizing the service to our tastes, it’s really just putting a different bow on the same gifts it’s offering to many of us already. For all Netflix’s claims of customization, the content–more frequently produced by Netflix itself–is of a limited pool often from Netflix’s own production company.
That means, at the end of the day, that yes–Netflix is spending billions to make us happy. But if we don’t like all the content it’s created? The company will let the algorithms package it, and perhaps repackage it again, until we at least think we might.