Gruvi Weekly Digest #92 – MoviePass sounded too good to be true – maybe because it was

A weekly catch up on things we’ve found interesting over the past week.
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Netflix Launches New Research Website

Netflix has launched a brand new website dedicated entirely to giving their audiences insight into their research: how they strive to make each viewer’s experience unique. With more than 100 million users in 190 countries, clearly, the streaming giant is at the top of the food chain when it comes to streaming content – Amazon Prime holds 85.3 million users, and Hulu 32 million users. The only provider still ahead of Netflix is YouTube, with 183 million subscribers worldwide.
The website is divided into “Machine Learning” and “Machine Learning Platform”, “Recommendations”, “Experimentation and Causal Inference”, and “Analytics” – and is linked to a Twitter page where users can ask questions.
Netflix say:
“To maximize the impact of our research, we do not centralize research into a separate organization. Instead, we have many teams that pursue research in collaboration with business teams, engineering teams, and other researchers”
With a part of the website dedicated to a job portal boasting a plethora of positions within this new research platform, it seems like Netflix isn’t just making a new website as a window into how Netflix goes about their research, but they’re actively building a whole new department.
It could seem like an obvious step for the streaming giant to take ahead of predictions that their user numbers will continue to grow by 2020. But it will be interesting to see whether, as far as marketing goes, this new research porthole will have a direct effect on this growth.
And whether their growing amount of users will be as interested in how their algorithms fuel Netflix production, as much as continuing to enjoy seeing shows and movies appear on their screens that are tailor-cut to their desires.
But most importantly, what effect will this research website have in the industry, and what does Netflix hope to gain by revealing so much of how they operate?
Read the Netflix research blog here.
Other articles of note Wall Street is so sure MoviePass will fail, it’s become incredibly expensive to short
MoviePass isn’t doing so well – a rather disappointing development, considering the obvious appeal of the subscription: $9.99 per month to be able to see a movie per day in theatres across North America, where average theatre tickets cost $9.16. So was it just too good to be true?
It definitely seems like it: each time a user buys a ticket via the service, MoviePass pays the theatre in full, and the cost of the service has proven to far exceed its revenue. It’s now considered so unlikely for the business model to succeed, Wall Street investors are betting that the company’s stock price will fall. These short sellers still stand to make a pretty buck on the MoviePass dream if the whole thing comes crashing down.
Wall Street is so sure MoviePass will fail, it’s become incredibly expensive to short
A24 Buys Gaspar Noé’s Acclaimed Drug Trip Movie ‘Climax’ Out of Cannes 2018

Cannes’ Directors Fortnight premiered Noé’s new film to raving reviews, and indie distributor and studio A24 has wasted no time in buying the domestic rights for it. This is A24’s first purchase at Cannes 2018, and comes ahead of even their unveiling of David Robert Mitchell’s “Under The Silver Lake”, in competition later on in the festival.
The deal marks the first time A24 works with Gaspar Noé, whose previous works include the notable “Irreversible”, “Enter the Void”, and “Love” – IndieWire’s Eric Kohn writes that Climax shares much with the levitating camerawork Noé has used previously, and testament of a “talented filmmaker committed to fucking with your head”.
Sounds good to us!

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