AFI BLOG: Media and Technology

The Taste of Others - Film in Focus

If pressed, Joe Konstan will admit that he watches “fewer than two movies a year.” Yet Konstan has spent more than a decade creating software that attempts to figure out your taste in movies and suggest what you might want to watch next.

Konstan, a professor at the University of Minnesota, is just one of dozens of academic researchers trying to solve the problem of understanding our fickle predilections. In the commercial sector, Netflix is offering a $1 million prize to anyone who can help the DVD rental company improve its movie recommendations by at least 10 percent. Amazon has been a pioneer in examining the DVDs you’ve purchased (and others that you’ve searched for) and making suggestions about what you may want to buy next. Several start-up companies, including ChoiceStream and Matchmine, are also trying to design software that better intuits your likes and dislikes.

It’s a tall challenge, and recommendation software can still be clueless at times: just because I once bought a how-to-knit DVD for my wife as a gift, Amazon constantly suggests that I might want to own more craft-oriented discs. Netflix doesn’t have a way for users to let it know that they never watched a given DVD, even though it sat atop their TV for three weeks, which seems like it’d be an important piece of information.

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