Netflix has added the option to make movie playlists and share them with friends. This isn’t a particularly new or complicated idea, but I’m hoping that Flixtapes (because everything has to be #branded these days) can help fix Netflix’s movie discovery problem.
What discovery problem? Well, the fact that despite Netflix’s giant library, I still find myself stuck finding new things to watch every evening. Netflix’s algorithms are pretty good, but they’re mostly only useful for showing you things similar to what you’ve seen before.
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Eventually, you will have chewed through all the good Action Thrillers on Netflix, and you need to break out of the feedback bubble Netflix has created. There’s no algorithm that can analyze your taste, personality and current mood, but I’m hoping using your friends might be the solution.
Flixtapes are simple movie playlists that any user can create and share. You have to add a minimum of three movies or TV shows, and a max of six. At the moment, it’s pretty barebones — you get a link to your playlist which you can share on social networks, but there’s no way to go browse all my friend’s playlists, like I can on Spotify.
If the feature pans out and becomes popular, I could see it making my Netflixing experience a thousand times better. I tend to love movies that people recommend to me — 10 year old hockey documentaries or forgotten TV shows, the only correlation being that Netflix’s algorithms would never have suggested old, niche content to me.
Flixtapes should be live for all users right now — just go to flixtape.netflix.com and start creating.
