If you’re a Netflix customer, you’ll be all too familiar with the streamer’s library and how it’s set up. Currently, there’s a row at the top screen labelled ‘We think you’ll love these”, featuring a lineup of recommendations based on your viewing habits. For example, mine is mostly made up of horrors and thrillers, so there’s a very obvious theme going on here. But Netflix is hoping to improve the personalized experience even more, by delivering movie or TV show trailers that are more suited to your taste.
We all know the viewing library can be overwhelming, and even if you’re consulting our lists of the best Netflix shows and best Netflix movies, it can still be hard to choose what to watch. Netflix is hoping to make the experience better by getting viewers sucked into trailers that are tailored to them, instead of serving the same one to everyone. Instead of focusing on one huge show, say Squid Game season 2, viewers would watch trailers based on their own watching history instead.
How it would work
To further explain this, the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) published a 24-page document that details Netflix’s plan. This system would select different clips and arrange them in a custom order based on what it thinks you’d like, based on your watch history and titles you’ve ‘liked’. It would then create a ‘playgraph’ that determines the order in which these clips are played.
In order for this graph to stay relevant, it will change over time based on what you’ve been enjoying. So if you’ve found yourself watching a lot of comedy movies lately, you’d notice that you were being shown more comedy titles. It would learn from you and make your experience better, in theory.
This is all part of Netflix’s plans to help you navigate its ever-growing library, with this news coming after Netflix tested major changes that’ll make finding new movies and shows so much easier back in the summer.