http://www.fastcompany.com/1830524/the-juiced-misleading-siz...
The point is, even if Netflix did offer 100,000 titles, would they offer any more of the most popular films? I'll be running the numbers against Amazon prime and Lovefilm soon, so we'll see how they compare.
While I wouldn't mind if Netflix would start offering a la carte as well, personally it's not much of a bother. The videos play either way.
So the whole "vs" approach may not be the most accurate. I'm not limited to any one of them, and with a month of Netflix costing less than a single top-tier movie "purchase" on iTunes it's not hard to justify a bit of mix and match.
Joking aside: Comparing only movies really skews the quality focus of the marketplaces to purchasers vice subscribers. Subscribers would be more motivated/less inhibited to watch TV series and would receive better value, than a purchaser. If that is true then iTunes would have a greater motivation to drive quality movies instead of series, and Netflix would have the inverse motivation.
I guess my point was that less arbitrary categorization would be a more accurate study. Delivery, Audience, Length, and Top Level Genres may provide more insight into the comparability of the 2 libraries.
1. Netflix doesn't get to choose what they can offer; the studios still dictate to them, and many times I know I can't find something just because some executive has a hair up his ass about "release dates".
2. You're assuming that popular == good.
1. Differentiate netflix/itunes by color or marker.
2. Find a better way to show density. Messing with the opacity would help, as would contrasting colors. Nothing fancy like 3D, just a way to convey the density of points.
3. K nearest neighbours is counter intuitive at first. A better layout/ui could have been that when you hover over a point, it shows up to the right as one big poster, without any neighbours.
You have good data that is trapped in that scatter plot.
http://cold-mountain-3633.herokuapp.com/ (tested only in chrome)
1. Does "hover and update only one poster at a time" right. If goodfli.ms had built there website as something that communicated via json instead of HTML, I would have rolled this sort of page into the graphic as well:
http://goodfil.ms/film/89441-cars-2
2. Attempted to make a visual difference between netflix and itunes. I couldn't figure out how they determined whether something was in itunes, so the colors are more of a proof of concept than anything meaningful.
3. Rolled out a trick using fisheye distortion to allow people to explore density spatially via their mouse. To learn how it was done, think about how this works:
http://bost.ocks.org/mike/fisheye/
Overall, this is quick, dirty and probably missing the point of the original graphic.
Self serving plug: if you, fair reader, have data you want to be smeared in d3.js lipstick, I do requests: https://www.odesk.com/users/~~80bea7ba2750c34b
Sometimes it's a little tricky for us to gauge what's popular with streaming, as we don't get many of the options down in Australia.
1. A few times a month they actually have something I want to watch. It doesn't take very many occurrences of this to save me money over Amazon/iTunes.
2. Occasionally I just want to watch something, and don't really care what. Its nice to have a decent sized library of content that is available at no additional cost.
We also pay netflix under ten bucks a month and for that we save a few hundred dollars each month vs what it would cost to itunes all those shows.
Can anyone say how Amazon's streaming offering compares with netflix? Is it basically the same shows and movies (meaning we should go for one or the other?)
The 8 or whatever dollars a month is VERY well used by me; and, I go to vudu or Red box for the things I might want to watch that aren't available.
On the other hand, the Apple TV is $110 now, and the library is quite large, and the quality is great!
We don't have Netflix in Australia so it's pretty much a one man show in terms of viable alternatives.
That being said, I think there is an opportunity for something like "goodfilms", but I signed up and it combines the worst parts of itunes with the worst parts of netflix. I am not sure who it helps. Even the cute chart they present is deeply flawed from a UI perspective. They could have at least color coded the dots.
Netflix on the Apple TV has genre listings — I believe Apple designed the interface, so it may be a little different from other versions.
Movies, I don't care so much about... otherwise, I'd just use Redbox.
