HBO Max Takes on Netflix With Human Curation Instead of Solely Relying on Algorithms (cnet.com) 28
Just like nearly everything else on the internet, streaming services are ruled by recommendation algorithms that are designed to predetermine what people want before they ask for it. WarnerMedia is trying to accomplish the opposite with HBO Max. From a report: The company's new streaming service, which will allow for three concurrent streams, is positing itself as a human-first platform -- the opposite of Netflix's strategy. As streaming becomes more of a centerpiece in people's homes and more platforms find their way to people's television sets, focusing on improving the actual curation system subscribers use is just as important as available content, Sarah Lyons, senior vice president of product experience, told The Verge. CNET adds: Like rivals Netflix and Disney Plus, HBO Max has a sprawling catalog of hit shows and movies, plus a big-budget slate of exclusive originals packed with stars. But HBO Max is the most expensive of the bunch. New subscribers can sign up and pay a simple $15 a month subscription after a week-long free trial, the same price HBO already charges for its linear channel on most pay-TV providers and for its preexisting standalone streaming service, HBO Now. But if you're already paying for HBO in some form, the amount you'll have to pay for Max now, or whether you have to pay anything extra at all... well, it's complicated. "The question is: Does your provider have to deal with us for Max and do you move over? That answer will be fairly simple, and then beyond that it gets a little more complicated," Andy Forssell, the general manager of WarnerMedia's streaming operation, said in an interview last week. "We've got really broad distribution, and ... midnight next Tuesday we'll be where we are -- not that that's an end point, if there any discussions undone." To entice you to give it a try, HBO Max has padded itself with more content than you'll find on either the regular HBO channel or HBO Now.
Can't win (Score:2)
Either it's creepy because a human is looking at your watch history, or it's crap because it's just playlists recommended by algorithm.
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Well no, they aren't saying they have a human perusing your watch history and making personalized recommendations. They are saying they have people manually assembling collections of content and you can peruse such collections.
On the down side, it is less 'personalized' as it isn't devoting attention to individual watch history, on the other hand it may do better than trying to just have you follow a path through the content to those who have happened to have a watch history close to yours.
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Yeah, so it's just playlists, maybe with an algo recommending them.
If they really wanted to keep my custom they would stop cancelling things I like.
Have personalized lists worked so far... (Score:1)
On the down side, it is less 'personalized' as it isn't devoting attention to individual watch history,
I am more on the side of your thought that an impersonal result, may be better than a result tailored to people who watch similar things as you.
So far the Netflix recommendation engine has been, for me, pretty terrible. Maybe once or twice it recommended something I actually ended up liking, never mind wanted to watch at all.
That said I often find the human curated lists pretty bad as well - these days th
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BY THE POWER OF GREYSKULL!!
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Weren't they rebooting that? I'd watch it.
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Either it's creepy because a human is looking at your watch history, or it's crap because it's just playlists recommended by algorithm.
Not necessarily: a human who looks at your watch history doesn't need to know who you are or even what your client code/e-mail is in order to suggest additions. Looking at a watch list/watch history has privacy implications only if you can directly link it to a name, otherwise is just a list of titles, and maybe coarse geographic informations and viewing hours. Basically, with a well-planned out system, a curator would only know, for example, that some guy from Central Europe has devoured the anime catalogu
sure it will work (Score:2)
For all the skeptics, remember that Yahoo's curation knocked aside those algorithm folks like Alta Vista and Google, names we haven't heard since the 90s . . .
hawk
Well we got what we wanted. (Score:2)
We use to get annoyed at the cable companies, because they offered so many channels so we could only watch a few, and went Why can't we just pay for the channels we want.
Well now that is the case.
So we need to pay for Netflix, HBO Max, Amazon Prime, Hulu, Disney+, CBS All access.... Until we are paying about the same amount for cable TV to get all the shows we want to watch.
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Posts like yours, who keep saying "all the streaming services are expensive", almost seem to be made so that people end up saying "Meh, I might as well continue paying for cable since I'd pay the same price for all the streaming services".
Nobody is forcing you to subscribe to all the streaming services.
Nobody is forcing you to watch movies and TV shows that are exclusive to a streaming service.
You can pay for only the streaming service(s) that you want.
That's what most people wanted and so almost everyone i
Library (Score:3)
Most libraries carry decent selections of movies and TV shows. If they don't have it they can usually get it for you. It's not on demand, of course, so you have to do a modicum of planning to watch something, but it costs nothing but a bit of time.
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I think the problem is that one would hope for more distinction amongst the choices. Whether content will be on Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, CBS, HBO, or whatever is pretty arbitrary.
What people really wanted was to go a-la-carte for the generally more thematically distinct channels that prevailed in cable historically. Music channels or kids channels or sports channels or channels devoted to a particular genre or era. Of course even on cable that has largely broken down to a bunch of channels with no thema
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Well, if you like Anime there's Crunchy Roll. Other than that, I agree that the other streaming services are not "specialized" into particular genres. But you can't have those if too few people want it. Maybe some streaming services will split their offerings into genres, but in the end the least popular ones will simply get canceled too and we'll end right back where cable died: 90% reality shows, 9% alarmist news and 1% old movies from decades ago.
Not very arbitrary (Score:2)
I think the problem is that one would hope for more distinction amongst the choices.
There is a pretty strong distinction between most of the choices.
Disney of course, is an extremely distinct entity and is about family / popular entertainment.
Netflix is about populist but more "out there" and experimental content for the most part, along with original Hollywood style movies.
CBS is about Star Trek.
HBO is about higher end more artistically produced content.
Hulu is about crap that you only watch when extremel
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> Nobody is forcing you to subscribe to all the streaming services.
True, but I believe the original point was that If I want to watch the content I'm interested in, NO single streaming service carries it all. I'm basically forced to pay for multiple sources.
One practical solution would be to go through the streaming services on an X month basis, say an annual basis. Watch all the stuff on Netflix you want for a year, then change to Hulu for a year, switch to HBO for a year, switch to Amazon Prime for
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Unlike cable TV streaming services have all their content available all the time. You don't need to be subscribed to them all at once, you can switch every month or two as you use up the content they have available.
Netflix's recommendation system is vastly worse (Score:4, Insightful)
...than it used to be.
I remember being quite impressed years ago when I signed up, and it asked me to rate a few dozen movies 1-5 stars to seed the algorithm. After that, for every single movie it showed a rating for, based on what the algorithm thought -I- would rate it as, it was almost eerily precise. If I would have given a movie I hadn't seen as a 5, they algorithm predicted I would rate it a 5 movie. Same with what I'd rate a 3 or a 1. Impressive leveraging no doubt of thousands of other users whose rating opinions matched mine, and what they gave the movies I hadn't seen yet.
Now, they have a ridiculous "percentage match" rating, which is absolutely meaningless to me as a user, and it seems clear, was switched to purely to make the "rating" -more arbitrary-, so extraneous business factors could be injected into the "match rating" and assumed meaningful by the user as representing their actual preferences, to encourage them to click on it.
Annoying.
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Basically, when they went 'Netflix Original', they pretty much blew the algorithms for the sake of steering people to content they had favorable rights over.
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Algorithms can really suck (Score:2)
Another example of this bullshit is AliExpress where searching for something innocuous like "spoon" will choke up your recommendations with spoons even if you ordered the spoon
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Curation? (Score:1)
Isn't that what any teenage blogger can do, and often does? Maybe instead of following the platform you can follow a third party with similar interests?
Really? (Score:1)
Seems like a good plan (Score:2)
$15 a month? (Score:2)
What form will this take? (Score:2)
I wonder what form the human curation will take? I'd love it if they provided categorization by curators name so when you find a curator who has similar taste in movies you can keep going back.
There used to be a great indie movie rental place by my house that did an employee pick section that was basically the same idea. They employed a few employees over the years that had similar tastes in movies as me and I was turned onto a good number of movies I might not have otherwise have watched by browsing their
I'm disappointed with Netflix (Score:2)
What's even more disappointing is that they don't have complete series. Some of them have only a few out of say 22 episodes. This just sucks!