Video streaming service, Netflix has announced that it is ditching its five star ratings system for a much more simple thumbs up or thumbs down system.
According to Netflix, testing for thumbs up and thumbs down ratings have been ongoing for some time with hundreds of thousands of users which eventually resulted in a 200 percent more ratings generated.
“Five stars feel very yesterday now. We are spending many billions of dollars on the titles we are producing and licensing, and with these big catalogues, that just adds a challenge,” said Todd Yellin, Netflix vice president at a press briefing at the company’s headquarters in California on Thursday, 16 March 2017.
The change will take place from April 2017 and will roll out globally.
The company is also introducing a new percent-match match feature that shows how good of a match any given show or movie is for an individual subscriber. For example, a show that should close to perfectly fit a user’s taste may get a 98 percent match. Shows that have less than a 50 percent match would not display a match-rating.
The company said it is not limiting the matches to regional interests, as it has found people are perfectly willing to watch shows that has been produced in other countries or has subtitles.
“We are finding these clusters of people and then we are figuring out who is like you, who enjoys these kinds of things, and then we are mixing and matching these,” Yellin said.
Yellin also stated that Netflix relied completely on its users rating titles with stars when it began personalization some years ago. At one point, it had over 10 billion 5-star ratings, and more than 50 percent of all members had rated more than 50 titles.
Overtime, the company noted that explicit star ratings were less relevant than other signals. Users would rate documentaries with 5 star, and silly movies with just 3 stars, but still watch silly movies more often than those high-rated documentaries.
