Written by: Roshan Dwivedi
When Netflix decided to go into the entertainment-producing business by commissioning the online video on demand series “House of Cards,” there was a lot of data to be crunched before the first download ever took place, said Dave Hastings, Netflix’s director of product analytics, data science and engineering.
“You do not make a $100 million investment these days without an awful lot of analytics,” Hastings said at the recent Wharton Customer Analytics Initiative Conference in Philadelphia. While some may claim that Netflix over-analyzed “House of Cards,” Hastings is adamant that it was the way to go. “We have had a whole catalogue of things we did not make. We wanted early on to be careful, and it has worked out.”
Just four years after the March 2011 release of that first season of “House of Cards,” Hastings said Netflix has as many as 60 series seasons in the works or soon to arrive, from season two of comic book adaptation “Marvel’s Daredevil” to another “House of Cards” season to a new comedy talk show with Chelsea Handler. All of them will undergo thorough analytics before release.
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