Netflix Reportedly Dropping One of Its Streaming Features

According to a new report by The New York Times, Netflix users might be saying goodbye to the feature that shows how much of a percentage of a match a title is for a viewer. Dating back to the days of the company sending out DVDs, Netflix has experimented with a number of ways to try to match users up with titles that might be a good fit for them, with the current match percentage using tags connected to titles a viewer has already watched to suggest similar programming. This new report claims that Netflix aims to drop the match percentage completely in favor of suggesting new titles based solely on the use of these tags.

Netflix has experimented with many different ways of getting a viewer’s feedback on movies and TV shows they watch, having previously used a star system, which was then replaced with a thumbs-up or thumbs-down option, which then added a double thumbs-up rating for titles audiences really “love.” All of these ratings factored into a match percentage, though the streamer will be investing more in the tags that are used to describe various titles going forward.

Subscribers are already at least somewhat familiar with these tags, as a home page might suggest titles that feel highly specific, such as “visually striking movies,” “award-winning dark movies,” or “20th-century period pieces.” More than being automatically generated by software, The New York Times noted that there is a dedicated staff of 30 who are in charge of creating and assigning such tags to titles.

By abandoning the match percentage graphic, Netflix can spotlight these tags to draw in a viewer, with Allan Donald, a director of product at Netflix, explaining the importance of these tags on a visual level.

“Imagine magazines that have no cover lines, and there were just photographs on them,” Donald explained. “Tags make as much of a difference as a cover line in that snap ‘this is for me’ decision.”

The report explained that Netflix has somewhere in the realm of 3,000 tags, with the most popular being “romantic,” “exciting,” and “suspenseful,” and the least used being “Occupation: farmhand.” For subscribers who might notice how oddly specific some of these tags are and what makes similar-seeming tags get their own attribution, there are numerous discussions about such things.

“Let’s start with something that’s been bubbling up from the analysts doing all of our tagging,” Sherrie Gulmahamad, a senior tagger at the streamer, said during a meeting. “We have ‘falling in love’ versus ‘finding love,’ and we also have ‘looking for love.’ Do we think we need to squish these down into one tag? Or do we think that they’re nuanced and there is a difference between them?”

The verdict was that all three tags were distinct and different enough to remain. 

When the match percentage will be removed definitively is yet to be determined. Stay tuned for updates about Netflix.

What do you think of the change? Let us know in the comments!