Probably my favorite shot from this weekend’s trip to Bali where my friends Christian and Jean got married. Captured and edited on an iPhone 5S, too. Compared to the functional but not album-worthy 2mp shots from the first iPhones, it’s hard to argue this isn’t the only camera most people need today.
Month: January 2014
-
-
In Bali for Christian & Jean’s wedding
Bert took a photo of Jussi taking a photo of me taking a photo of Joel taking a photo of the Balinese sunset. Good times. – with Joel, Jussi, and Bert at Ayana Resort And Spa
View on Path
-
Rimba Hotel, Bali
The Rimba hotel here in Bali is really nice too, if a tad unfinished. Under the same ownership as the Ayana Resort where we are staying; you take a free tram over and sit at the rooftop bar if you have nothing to do at noon like us. – with Jussi and Bert at Rimba Jimbaran Bali
View on Path
-
➟ How Netflix Reverse Engineered Hollywood
Alexis Madrigal, for The Atlantic:
What emerged from the work is this conclusion: Netflix has meticulously analyzed and tagged every movie and TV show imaginable. They possess a stockpile of data about Hollywood entertainment that is absolutely unprecedented.
Using large teams of people specially trained to watch movies, Netflix deconstructed Hollywood. They paid people to watch films and tag them with all kinds of metadata. This process is so sophisticated and precise that taggers receive a 36-page training document that teaches them how to rate movies on their sexually suggestive content, goriness, romance levels, and even narrative elements like plot conclusiveness.
The data can’t tell them how to make a TV show, but it can tell them what they should be making. When they create a show like House of Cards, they aren’t guessing at what people want.
What a huge undertaking, and a demonstration of Amazon-like patience for a company like Netflix—slowly, quietly, build a long-view competitive advantage in technology and process that becomes impossible for others to copy, and that eventually enables a whole new range of products that are themselves hard to compete with.
This sort of rich metadata is what I’d expect IMDB to have, but a categorization exercise of so much subjective material benefits from the guidance of a single hand, while self-policing committees take much too long.