Instant Watching Queue

[Adrian]

We just upgraded the Queue page for everyone to have an Instant Queue as well as the DVD Queue (both with a 500 limit). Movies from your DVD Queue that are available to play are automatically added to the Instant Queue on your first visit. Buttons have an extra option that lets you add to Instant Queue or Play immediately.

The availability column in the Instant Queue will tell you if that title is being taken off the Instant Watch system in the near future. Unlike DVDs where Netflix owns the physical disc, the rights to broadcast Instant content may be for a specific time period, so titles can come and go.

Note that Brent has posted an announcement to the Netflix blog.

Let us know what you think...
Adrian from Netflix

[Adrian]

I think we usually give a few weeks warning before a title is pulled, although we sometimes have issues (like an encoding problem) that can cause a title to be pulled immediately while we get it fixed.

[joeoftexas]

This 'expiration date' feature is good for a procrastinator like me.
I'll hurry up and watch a title 'instantly', if I know it will become unavailable in that format soon.

[wowwee123]

Also noticed that there is an expiration date to some titles. Very good. Do I now remove the ones in the main Q, and just keep the ones I want to rent in physical form?

If movies could be sorted by expiration date, that would be very helpful.

The "Recently Watched" tab shows for me, the last 3 titles? Does this amount reflect the DVD plan one's on?

[Adrian]

Yes you can remove them from the DVD Queue. When you delete from the Instant Queue it does not also delete from the DVD Queue, so you have to delete twice if you really don't want the title. After the initial transfer of titles to the IQ, adding/deleting on each queue is independent.

The Recently Watched tab doesn't care about the DVD plan, its probably time based with a limit, but I haven't checked the details.

[joeoftexas]

Excellent... Thanks !

[Cleesha]

And that would be available for us Mac user's when?

[Adrian]

Everyone gets the Instant Queue. We are working to get a Mac player and TV based players out later this year so you can start to collect movies now. I'm a Mac user...

[John-Charleston]

This is a great addition to the queue. Makes it much easier to sort.
I'm new to the forums. Is there a place to make suggestions for changes?
One feature that drives me nuts is how Netflix rates movies I'm browsing according to "Our best guess for John". Much better to just let me know how others liked it and let ME make the guess.
Thanks,
John

[Adrian]

Discussions in the this website section of the forum are likely to be read by various Netflix people.

We do take what we know about you into account when we make suggestions. You can see the average number of stars and what we predict for you for each movie. The more history you have and the more ratings you have, the better the suggestions become.

[John-Charleston]

Thanks for the reply Adrian,
I understand how Netflix makes suggestions based on my own ratings and that makes sense to me but the red stars rating a movie based on what Netflix thinks I would think of a movie seems to be carrying it too far. I've rated 282 movies and Netflix's guesses are too often way off base.
Actually it might make the most sense if this were a feature that one could choose or not. The ratings are good, the guesses are not.
John

[Adrian]

On average the guesses are within one star either way. This is known as the Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) and you might have heard of the Netflix Prize, which is researching ways to reduce the error by 10%, which is a hard but worthwhile improvement.

The main use of this is to show you movies that we think will be highly rated before we show you movies that would be lower rated. Its one of many things that are considered to pick the movies you see.

[John-Charleston]

Maybe it just doesnt' work so well for me. I usually hone in on movies I'm browsing based on the rating. But I put little stock in the Netflix guess so I have to keep clicking on the movie just to see what the community rating is. It's just a little clumsy.