The Next Movie You Watch On Netflix May Be Chosen By A Fruit Fly

If you can believe it, people used to have to travel across town in order to secure a movie rental for home entertainment. Luckily, thanks to modern streaming services, the days of late fees, membership cards and five dollar movie rentals is over. Netflix started the online streaming trend nearly twenty years ago.

When Netflix first hit the market, it was not immediately successful. Many people found mail-order DVDs and streaming services to be impractical. But Netflix soon proved to be a popular innovation in home entertainment. You may think that Netflix is fine the way it is, but executives with Netflix are still trying to innovate certain aspects of the Netflix experience in order to secure the number one spot in the streaming service market. Anybody who has used streaming services knows that these services recommend movies based on what you have already watched. It may seem like these movie recommendations are randomly chosen.

However, all streaming services, like Hulu, Amazon and Spotify, generate movie, TV and music recommendations with advanced algorithms. It is important for streaming services to recommend movies that consumers will want to watch. Sometimes movie and television recommendations miss the mark. But other times recommendations are right on.

Streaming services are attempting to generate more advanced recommendation algorithms. Officials with Netflix believe that recommending movies that agree with an individual consumers taste will allow the company to remain the number one streaming service. In order to perfect recommendation selections Netflix executives are recruiting fruit flies.

Fruit flies protect themselves by categorizing different odors as either dangerous or desirable. Fruit flies also compare new odors to past odors in order to better predict which odors should be avoided and which should be sought after. Referencing past odors as a way of predicting the effects of a new odor is referred to as “similarity searches”.

Netflix executives believe that fruit flies could use their mental similarity searches to improve upon the existing algorithms that determine which movies are selected as recommendations. Some experts think that fruit flies would be far better than algorithms at determining which movies you will like. A new study suggests that fruit flies could be used as a model for the development of a new computer program that would select work to select recommended movies.

Such a program would mimic fruit fly similarity searches. This means that fruit flies may be better than you when it comes to finding movies that you will like.

Would you be interested in reading the study about the computerization of fruit fly similarity searches?