A Peek Into Netflix Queues

margaret writes "The New York Times has an interactive Web app where you can map the popularity of various Netflix titles by neighborhood, in a dozen different cities. Invasion of privacy or harmless voyeuristic fun? Either way, it's pretty interesting."

Comments

Interesting relationship

[Spykk]

Anyone else notice that Knowing's rank seems inversely proportional to Rachel Getting Married's rank?

Intesting how College area is way off

[piltdownman84]

Looking at the Seattle map one interesting thing stands out for me. The rentals in the zip code of Seattle University seems completely different then everywhere else. What is interesting that ' pseudo intellectual' movies that you would think would be more popular, Milk, Benjamin Button, Frost/Nixon, are relatively low in this area of learning, while mindless movies, Role Models, House Bunny, where the most popular.

Re:Intesting how College area is way off

[HouseOfMisterE]

I'm not sure about Milk or Frost/Nixon, but there was a DVD screener for Benjamin Button available for download months before the retail DVD was released. That may have measurably impacted rentals in a college ZIP code area. Or not, who knows?

cultural information

[phantomfive]

You can use it as an indication of how different regions feel about homosexuality by looking at the rental patterns for Milk (no link, sorry, you'll have to click through the movies until you find it). It was a lot more popular on the west side of the bay than the east side, which also matched voting patterns for proposition 8 (the west side was a lot more strongly opposed to it). In Boston it seems like they are a lot more open minded, except in area code 02126. Don't know what happened there.

Strangely enough, Milk is in the top 3 movies in San Francisco in every area except the Castro. Try explaining that one if you can.

Re:cultural information

[StreetStealth]

That's actually really interesting to consider -- You could think of Netflix popularity as a band pass of the full spectrum of movie popularity. Imagine a few graphs for other channels that signify different levels of investment: theatrical viewing and DVD purchase above rental, cable viewing below it, and torrenting at the bottom. Now imagine these distributions overlaid on top of each other. I wonder what that graph would look like...

Large differences in some areas...

[drZool]

Could perhaps be explained by europeans using VPN accounts in these areas to access netflix.

Re:You're kidding, right?

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a theoretical max of 10^5 = 100,000 zip codes. There are roughly 10,000,000 Netflix subscribers, so if there were an even distribution, that would give about 100 subscribers per zip code. I suspect that this varies considerably, though I'm not sure which way things would swing among urban/suburban/rural. Urban has more alternatives but higher prices, suburban has social reclusiveness, but also sufficient disposable income for theaters, rural lacks theaters and conventional rental options, but may not emphasize movies as much culturally. 100 should be enough for a reasonable degree of privacy, especially when high probably means 5-15 out of those 100 (depending on how long a period this collects data for).

Re:This just proves...

[arminw]

...I don't want to risk ending up a troll....

The Slashdot moderation system is broken, totally ruined. It seems that anyone who posts anything controversial, to which the majority of Slashdot readers disagree, gets modded troll or flamebait. On the other hand, obscenity and profanity often gets modded insightful. I have gotten to the point where I don't give a hoot if every one of my posts gets modded down, just because I often post opinions to which the majority disagrees.

By refraining to speak your mind, just because you don't want to be modded down, you're helping prop up a broken system.