[Ip-health] The Netflix prize

[James Love]

*  Netflix, Inc., the world's largest online movie rental service,
today announced the creation of the Netflix Prize, an award of one
million dollars to the first person who can achieve certain accuracy
goals in recommending movies based on personal preferences.

* In creating the Netflix Prize, the company said it was inspired by
the unconventional approach used to win the Longitude Prize, which
was created in 1714 by the British government to focus on one of the
most vexing and dangerous aspects of transoceanic travel --
determining a ship's longitude.

http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/061002/sfm014.html

Press Release	Source: Netflix, Inc.

Netflix Creates $1 Million Netflix Prize to Promote Progress in
Recommendation Systems
Monday October 2, 3:05 am ET
Scientists Challenged to Analyze Dataset of 100 Million Movie Ratings

LOS GATOS, Calif., Oct. 2 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Netflix, Inc.
(Nasdaq: NFLX - News), the world's largest online movie rental
service, today announced the creation of the Netflix Prize, an award
of one million dollars to the first person who can achieve certain
accuracy goals in recommending movies based on personal preferences.
The company also made available to contestants 100 million anonymous
movie ratings ranging from one to five stars, the largest such data
set ever released.

Netflix said it will publish a detailed description of the winning
approach for the benefit of companies, entrepreneurs and academicians.

Recommendation systems help people choose taste-based products by
comparing their tastes with similar tastes of other people.
Recommendation systems are particularly useful to consumers of
movies, books, music, clothing and entertainment.

"Recommendation systems covering a wide variety of categories will
play an increasingly significant commercial role in the future," said
Netflix Co- Founder, Chairman and CEO Reed Hastings. "Right now,
we're driving the Model T version of what is possible. We want to
build a Ferrari and establishing the Netflix Prize is a first step."

The threshold required to win the Netflix Prize is a 10 percent
improvement in accuracy over the current Netflix recommendation
system. If no one wins the grand prize this year, the company said it
will award a $50,000 progress prize to whoever makes the most
significant advancement toward the goal and will award a progress
prize annually until someone wins the grand prize.

Complete details for registering and competing for the Netflix Prize
are available at www.netflixprize.com .

In creating the Netflix Prize, the company said it was inspired by
the unconventional approach used to win the Longitude Prize, which
was created in 1714 by the British government to focus on one of the
most vexing and dangerous aspects of transoceanic travel --
determining a ship's longitude. The prize was won in 1761 by John
Harrison, who rather than focusing on star maps created a clock
precise enough to accurately keep the time of the ship's home port
and allowed navigators to use local time as measured by the height of
the sun to calculate longitude within a half degree. The movie
"Longitude" tells this story and is available at Netflix.

The Netflix Prize competition is open to anyone except Netflix
employees, their families, and company affiliates. The company is
inviting individual computer scientists and corporate or university
teams well versed in the complexities of machine learning to pursue
the prize. A board of judges, including senior engineers at Netflix
and well-known members of the machine learning community, will
determine the grand prize or annual progress prize winners.

All personal information identifying individual Netflix customers has
been removed from the prize data. It contains only movie titles, star
ratings and dates but no text reviews.

A recommendation engine spanning the 65,000 titles in the Netflix
catalog is an essential element of the company's movie subscription
service. Each of Netflix's more than five million members enjoys a
personalized member Web site that enables them to rate movies on a
one to five star scale. Netflix pours those individual ratings into a
database of more than one billion movie ratings and relies on
proprietary algorithms and software to identify movies that tend to
be rated highly (or lowly) by people with similar tastes. The
accuracy of this software has been praised by movie critics and
members alike and enables Netflix to fulfill its goal of connecting
people with movies they'll love.

About Netflix

Netflix, Inc. is the world's largest online movie rental service,
providing more than five million subscribers access to over 65,000
DVD titles. The company offers a variety of subscription plans,
starting at $5.99 a month. There are no due dates, no late fees and
no shipping fees. DVDs are delivered for free by the USPS from
regional shipping centers located throughout the United States.
Netflix can reach more than 90 percent of its subscribers with
generally one business-day delivery. Netflix offers personalized
movie recommendations to its members and has more than one billion
movie ratings. Netflix also allows members to share and recommend
movies to one another through its Friends(SM) feature. For more
information, visit www.netflix.com .


Source: Netflix, Inc.

---------------------------------
James Love, CPTech / www.cptech.org / mailto:james.love@cptech.org /
tel. +1.202.332.2670 / mobile +1.202.361.3040

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