Netflix focused on understanding users’ real-time browsing behaviour: Eunice Kim

When it comes to product development, our goal is to bring our members joy and make sure that they can discover and connect to the stories they love, as opposed to just pushing a point of view on what we think they should watch. we are doing this on a scale bigger than any other streaming service in the world. We have 270 million members, translating  into over 600 million people using Netflix globally. We cater to a really broad and diverse set of tastes, and we want to ensure that the stories from anywhere can be enjoyed everywhere. This plays out both at the deep layers of the technology, the architecture, whether partnering with ISPs or the way we build our TD software development kit that goes across many devices. It also plays out in how we think about the extensibility, the experience, and ensuring  it’s performing across so many devices around the world.

I’ll give you an example of a complexity we always wrestle with.  We are operating in 190 markets around the world. Amazing insights come from all corners of our global team around what is working and not working. But if you’re fine-tuning the product for India, separately from Argentina, separately from South Korea, or the United States, you can potentially lose scalability very quickly.  So we are very intentional in thinking  about where to localize our product experiences and where to hold the fort down to say this needs to be common across  the world.  Where we localize the most is what I call the four Ps-  pricing plans, payments and partnerships. So, how we go to market is the area in which we want to create the most flexibility so that we have really a product market fit, experience. and value that makes sense for each market worldwide. But when you come down to the core experience, it could be very expensive for us to build and maintain for a single market. So those are the kinds of trade-offs that we have to make continuously. 

From a business perspective, we’ve been building towards what I describe as a broader world of entertainment that we’re bringing to our members around the world. So, this includes a lot more variety in our non-English language slate. It includes entering into gaming, which we did in late 2021, and the addition of live content, which we have started more in the US. So, when you think about that breadth of entertainment, that is probably one of the biggest shifts over the last five years. And you, we have to really materially think differently about how  we’re designing, both the service from a discovery perspective, as well as the underlying architecture of what we’re building. The behaviour behind Live is just super different from Video on Demand. For a live event, you want to be there right when the action occurs. The service needs to be able to educate our members when something is happening, remind them, and make sure that the way we surface that content is incredibly timely. That kind of tune-in behaviour is something that we’re working hard to  perfect. Games will also give you really different engagement behaviour.  So when we resurface that game to you and remind you that you were in the middle of this, and you got to level 100 but pushed  on to level 101, that is, again, a different behaviour where we have to understand where you are in your gameplay and how to encourage you to kind of re-engage as well. So, all of these really fun and exciting areas for us to learn about different ways of thinking about engagement that are more tailored to each content type.

Each member tends to have very diverse tastes. On average, each member is watching six different genres on Netflix. The second thing is that most of our viewing, about 70%, is happening in the living room and on the TV device.. So not only do we have to worry about what is going on in your head in terms of what you want to watch, but also maybe your family members sitting there on the couch with you. Even though we know what you might have watched historically, what you want to watch right now could be very specific. Our research shows that 40% of the time, people have a very good sense of what they want to watch. But it is just as often that people have a vague idea or literally no idea. So we have to be able to both suggest for the member who truly has no idea and help the member who needs to navigate. One of the big shifts we’ve been making is ensuring that we understand your tastes . And what that means, on a practical level, is really understanding your real-time browsing behaviour as you’re going through the service. If we start to see that you’re dwelling on the trailers of comedy shows and less so on the action movies that you tend to watch usually, we’re going to interpret that a little bit differently in terms of where the weighting is and what you’re interested in tonight. Doing that in real time requires us to change how we’re actually computing those recommendations. In the past, all of our recommendations were computed about 48 hours in advance, so it was more the sum of what you’ve been watching, and now we’re working towards paying closer attention to what we call your in-session behaviour. 

It isn’t necessarily true that watching  something within five seconds flat is the ideal member experience. The process of discovery is unfolding, and when our members browse the homepage a little bit more, they tend to notice new titles. So we don’t want people to just rush into watching the next series that they happen to be watching without seeing  what might be coming next.  We try to balance out that opportunity to make sure that our members know what’s coming and what’s new and that they can find something to watch right now. 

We always describe the mobile experience as a bit like the Swiss army knife. You may open the mobile app for a variety of reasons. It might be to watch something, it might be to manage your account settings, or it might be to just check in on information on a title that you intend to watch later on the TV. Certain use cases don’t exist on TV; for example, you can download content only on a mobile device. This becomes an important part of how  we design our product experience.

One of the things that we’re working on is to make sure that our experiences are even more intuitive, convenient, and easy to use while becoming more flexible over time. When you have more content types like Live and games, plus your core service that people know and love, and you want to create this flexibility, ensuring  it remains very intuitive for members is very important to us.