I was under the impression that Netflix looked at your ratings, found people "similar" to you, and made recommendations based on that. Since signing up for Netflix, I"ve found that at least on the UI side, it's as you describe: driven by actor, genre, etc.
The beauty about the raw data approach is that it finds people with similar preferences to you. This is, I think, the real manifestation of O'Reilly's "Web 2.0." Rather than a semantic web, with ontologies and categorization the data do, indeed, speak for themselves.
Even if we were able to extract categorizations based on the preferences in the underlying Netflix data, it'd be difficult to map them to actual categories that we're familiar with. I'd envision it more like a PCA decomposition, where the principle components will be the strongest characteristics among each clique of like-minded movie watchers.
But alas, my Netflix home page is filled with crappy movies (the Matrix has a near-5 rating, but most other movies with its actors are complete crap). Instead I rely on friends with similar preferences for recommendations... which is what Netflix was supposed to offer. If that functionality is hidden somewhere, then they need to do a better job of exposing it.
The beauty about the raw data approach is that it finds people with similar preferences to you. This is, I think, the real manifestation of O'Reilly's "Web 2.0." Rather than a semantic web, with ontologies and categorization the data do, indeed, speak for themselves.
Even if we were able to extract categorizations based on the preferences in the underlying Netflix data, it'd be difficult to map them to actual categories that we're familiar with. I'd envision it more like a PCA decomposition, where the principle components will be the strongest characteristics among each clique of like-minded movie watchers.
But alas, my Netflix home page is filled with crappy movies (the Matrix has a near-5 rating, but most other movies with its actors are complete crap). Instead I rely on friends with similar preferences for recommendations... which is what Netflix was supposed to offer. If that functionality is hidden somewhere, then they need to do a better job of exposing it.