How to unlock the mystery of Netflix genres

By extensively dissecting each movie in its collection, Netflix has been able to create tens of thousands of 'microgenres,' a fraction of which can now be accessed through unique URLs. 

|
Mike Blake/Reuters
The Netflix logo is shown in this illustration file photograph in Encinitas, California October 14, 2014.

In the mood for a goofy crime action and adventure flick from the 1980s? How about irreverent independent mockumentaries? If you’re bored with your Netflix queue, these are some of the tens of thousands of hyper-specific genres accessible on the movie streaming service – the vast majority of which remain hidden from site users.

Netflix, which boasts over 50 million users worldwide, has long prided itself in concocting meticulous algorithms for predicting movie choices for every individual watcher. One of its many features is the personalized genre lists – perhaps “Quirky Romantic Comedies” if you’ve recently watched "Silver Linings Playbook," or maybe “Dark Showbiz Movies,” because you gave five stars to "Sunset Boulevard."

But these strangely particular movie categories aren’t so random after all. By tagging every component of every movie in Netflix’s collection, a team of engineers has been able to create an immense catalog of genres. The tagged information, called "metadata," includes not only basic film qualifiers including the setting and the extent of violence, but also more subjective ones, such as the resolution of plot and the morality of the protagonist.

The result: 76,897 different categories of movies, and counting. The figure was first recorded by The Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal, who coded a bot to discover each possible micro-genre, all of which are assigned a numerical code that appears at the end of the Netflix genre's Web address.

For instance, “Irreverent French-Language Comedies” have the URL netflix.com/browse/genre/1584. “Visually-striking Imaginative Children & Family Movies” is netflix.com/browse/genre/2480.

If you were to switch the last four digits with a random two to five digit value, chances are you’ll stumble upon another unique, sometimes absurdly funny, genre. The code “9999” pulls up “Violent Movies Starring Robert De Niro.” The code “444” brings you to “Gory B-Horror Movies from the 1980’s.”

“Netflix has meticulously analyzed and tagged every movie and TV show imaginable. They possess a stockpile of data about Hollywood entertainment that is absolutely unprecedented,” Mr. Madrigal writes in his 2014 dissection of Netflix’s complicated genre algorithms.

He goes on:

Using large teams of people specially trained to watch movies, Netflix deconstructed Hollywood. They paid people to watch films and tag them with all kinds of metadata. This process is so sophisticated and precise that taggers receive a 36-page training document that teaches them how to rate movies on their sexually suggestive content, goriness, romance levels, and even narrative elements like plot conclusiveness.

They capture dozens of different movie attributes. They even rate the moral status of characters. When these tags are combined with millions of users viewing habits, they become Netflix's competitive advantage. The company's main goal as a business is to gain and retain subscribers. And the genres that it displays to people are a key part of that strategy.

As any Netflix subscriber would know, there are only about 20 genres displayed in the “Browse” section of the homepage. So what about the the other 76,877?

Well, for starters, not every conceived genre has a movie filed under it at any given moment. “Witty Movies directed by Woody Allen,” code 2535, for example, is currently empty. “Skateboarding Non-fiction,” however, has one (the 2013 documentary "The Motivation").

Providing too many genre choices also poses the possibility of overwhelming users. Infinite options, writes psychologist Barry Schwartz in his 2004 book "The Paradox of Choice," can “produce genuine suffering.”

But in case you have fastidious taste in films, a couple of kind-hearted fellow cinephiles have compiled some cheat sheets. Check them out here and more comprehensively, here.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to How to unlock the mystery of Netflix genres
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/The-Culture/TV/2016/0112/How-to-unlock-the-mystery-of-Netflix-genres
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe