I think there have been some articles written on this, but I don't know where they are at the moment so I'll just explain it here.
When people shop Amazon for books (for example), they tend to buy books of a specific type, so it can be easy to suggest other books of the same type.
With movies, people may do the same thing, however people usually don't limit themselves to one genre. People may watch a much wider variety of movies: horror, comedy, action, romance, etc.
Predicting what you like from those genres can be tough to predict if you've only rented one movie so far, and that movie is a drama.
If someone were to come up with a very clever recommendation engine, Netflix could benefit from it phenomenally. I think they're mainly looking for an engine that can recommend things based on only one or 2 movies. New customers who don't know much about Netflix have a better chance of sticking around if they find movies they like early on without having to search for them.
In my opinion, they already have a recommendation engine on par with Amazon. I think they're looking to enhance it further.
answered 2009-06-19T11:53:02.093