In the future, Netflix will know exactly what you want to watch, even before you do. You won’t have to spend all that time browsing through endless lists of shows on your television.
That’s according to Neil Hunt, Netflix’s chief product officer. It’s just one of many predictions for the future of TV that the forward-thinking executive laid out on stage today at New York City’s Internet Week conference, and no one would be surprised if all that came to fruition. If there’s one company that knows about changing the way we watch TV shows and movies, it’s Netflix. From its humble origins as a DVD-by-mail outfit back in 1997 to its current status as a video streaming powerhouse and original content creator, Netflix has already overturned the status quo more than once.
As a slew of other tech companies, from Amazon to Yahoo, compete with Netflix to move television online–and traditional broadcasters fight to protect their old business models–Hunt has a clear vision for how the war for our attention will play out by the year 2025. Here are a few of his predictions:
You’ll Have 48 Million TV Channels
People have traditionally discovered new shows by tuning into the channels that were most aligned with their interests. Love news? Then CNN might be the channel for you. If it’s children’s programming you want, Nickelodeon has you covered. And yet, none of these channels can serve 100 percent of their customers what they want to watch 100 percent of the time.
According to Hunt, this will change with internet TV. He said Netflix is now working to perfect its personalization technology to the point where users will no longer have to choose what they want to watch from a grid of shows and movies. Instead, the recommendation engine will be so finely tuned that it will show users “one or two suggestions that perfectly fit what they want to watch now.”
“I think this vision is possible,” Hunt said. “We’ve come a long way towards it, and we have a ways to go still.” He said Netflix is now devoting as much time and energy to building out that personalization technology as the company put into building the infrastructure for delivering that content in the first place.
Url : http://www.wired.com/2014/05/neil-hunt/
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