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Amazon Prime Video Has More Movies, But Netflix Has Higher-Rated Films, Study Says (usatoday.com)
When you want to watch a movie, which streaming service truly delivers? If you want quality, opt for Netflix. If you prefer quantity, peruse Amazon Prime Video. From a report: That's the conclusion from Streaming Observer. The tech news website looked at all of the movies on Netflix, Amazon, Hulu and HBO Now as of January 20 and analyzed the films' ratings on movie and TV review site Rotten Tomatoes. Also factored in: data from the streaming providers, as well as third-party search sites Reelgood and JustWatch. The site found Amazon had the most movies (17,461) -- four times that of Netflix (3,839) and many more times the amount on Hulu (2,336) and HBO (815). But Netflix had more movies -- 596, more than 15 percent of its library -- with a "Certified Fresh" rating from Rotten Tomatoes, a designation given to the best-reviewed films.
I've never found Rotten Tomatoes to be particularly useful. IMDb seems much more sane:
https://www.imdb.com/search/ti...
Oh that's odd. Maybe I was confused by the "BEST MOVIES OF ALL TIME" header on the list: https://www.rottentomatoes.com...
How you could possibly believe any rating from that site is unbelievable, but people are naive and stupid.
Amazon has probably the worst interface on PC to get to their movies. Most apps to search are much better but not great. Until they fix the GUI the video that comes with Amazon Prime is just a bonus to the shipping option. Just copy Netflix and be done with it already!
At least with Amazon you can hover to see the rating of the movie or show. Easy to cherry pick good content. With Netflix, I don't know if a move is crap without bouncing over to Rotten Tomatoes and searching. And no, I don't trust Netflix's recommendation % outside of genre.
Amazon has strong original content and an extensive library of quality British / Euro shows, which I personally enjoy. In aggregate, my feeling is that Amazon provides a better overall content experience that Netflix.
The top rated movie of ALL TIME on Rotten Tomatoes is "Black Panther". So....yeah.
A) Actually, it's not. It's the top ranked using their "Adjusted Score", but it's not the top rated, which should have been obvious, given that it has a 97% rating currently and there are plenty of films with a 100% rating.
B) If you hover over the ? on the Best of RT page, you'll see that their Adjusted Score is calculated using a Bayesian formula that's designed to account for variations in the number of reviewers per movie. I.e. More reviewers in agreement will result in a higher Adjusted Score. As such, it should be fairly obvious that their Adjusted Score will be biased towards more recent films (i.e. ones with more reviews).
C) A bias towards more recent films is a feature, not a bug, given that it helps their users discover films they haven't yet seen that are more likely to be available, which is basically the entire point of Rotten Tomatoes. They aren't the AFI, BAFTA, or Academy. They make no claim to being the arbiters of all that is good in film.
D) Despite the bias, the top 10 still contains three films (The Wizard of Oz, Citizen Kane, The Third Man) from the last century, and every set of 10 after that contains 4 to 7 films from the last century, suggesting that it's still doing a pretty good job at bubbling up the best films, even if they're not necessarily ranked in the top 100 in the order we might think they should be.
But, perhaps most importantly, your argument is missing the point entirely. The question of good vs. great—should Black Panther be ranked higher than Citizen Kane?—doesn't matter when we're talking about the overall quality of streaming libraries. What matters is whether they do a good job at distinguishing good vs. bad—that they correctly labeled Black Panther and Citizen Kane as "Certified Fresh" while not giving that label to most of the schlock that comes out each day. Towards that end, it seems like Certified Fresh is a decent indicator of quality, even if you (and I, just to be clear) might disagree with how they rank individual films within the Certified Fresh set.