If you’re struggling to find something worth watching in Netflix’s vast catalog and don’t trust your friends’ recommendations, the streaming service has good news for you.
The company is finally launching a “random play” feature for users who prefer to let an algorithm choose their next series for fun.
The streaming service has confirmed that it will launch the feature globally during a Interview with investors in the fourth quarter on Tuesday.
“Our members can basically indicate that they want to skip browsing completely, click on a button and we’ll choose a title for them to play instantly,” he said. COO and product director Greg Peters.
Peters did not specify a release date for the feature, but Variety reports that it will arrive in the first half of this year.
[Read: How Netflix shapes mainstream culture, explained by data]
Netflix has been testing the function at least since April 2019, when viewers began to detect an “Random Episode” label on their playback controls.
Other rounds of testing followed last year. In August, several users noticed a Random Play button on the Netflix TV app, promising “to find things for you to watch based on your tastes”.
Random play on Netflix. It’s a thing … pic.twitter.com/Le1D3IxRwp
– Tom💙 (@tall_n_moody) August 18, 2020
Delivering your visualization options to an algorithm can seem risky (or even inhuman). But Netflix has already shown the value of its AI-driven suggestions.
The company claims that more than 80% of the programs watched on the service are discovered through its recommendation system, which analyzes your viewing habits to find new programs that you like.
In an interview with Wired, Todd Yellin, vice president of product innovation at Netflix, compared the system to a three-legged stool:
The three legs of this bank would be members of Netflix; taggers who understand everything about the content; and our machine learning algorithms that take all the data and put it together.
The new shuffle feature remains unnamed now. Netflix Co-CEO Reed Hastings playing suggested calling it “I’m feeling lucky”, a nod to an old Google button that took users directly to the main result of their search.
“We’re going to invent something better than that, so wait for it,” replied Peters. “You’ll see when that happens.”
Published January 20, 2021 – 19:32 UTC