The days of long, drawn-out negotiations with your significant other over what you two will watch on Netflix are soon to be things of the past. During Netflix’s There’s Never Enough TV live-stream event on YouTube on February 8, Netflix’s vice president of product innovation, Todd Yellin, revealed the streaming service is testing a new feature that will allow people to share a profile.
Yellin says the shared profiles would be based on the tastes of two people who share an account with separate profiles of their own. “You can have a Bill and Susan profile. You can find out where your tastes overlap.” The experience will be customized so content that matches both of your tastes will be recommended. Yellin only referred to the hypothetical of two people’s shared tastes being represented in a shared profile, so the feature could initially be limited to two profiles from one account.
Yellin did not specify when or if the shared-profiles feature will be launched, but he did give insight into how Netflix picks new features. “We’ll try it with 1,000 people with it and 1,000 people without it, and if the 1,000 with it tend to watch more content, then we’ll launch such feature.” The future of you and your significant other finally agreeing on what to watch on Netflix could come down to 2,000 people.
Gates and Yellin both refer to the shared profile feature as the “Venn diagram of TV” and they delved into what will probably shape the feature: taste communities. Taste communities, according to Yellin, are clusters of shared tastes Netflix has observed among global video consumption behaviors among its 93 million subscribers. Yellin says Netflix has identified more than 1,300 of these taste communities.
Netflix recognizes its users do not want to labor over picking something to watch. Yellin says “the typical Netflix member is only going to look at 40 or 50 titles that are at the top of their search.” They are only spending between one-and-one-half and two seconds on each selection they are given, barely long enough to read the description of each title.
With more than 1,000 pieces of original content being prepared to be unleashed on Netflix subscribers, sharing a profile could be huge.
China just gave Hollywood a cautionary tale about AI filmmaking. Sanxingdui: Future Past, billed as the country's first fully AI-generated movie, hit theaters on October 23 and bombed at the box office.
According to Futurism, the film's reported $1.5 million production budget landed on more than 10,000 screens. Yet it pulled in only about $181,000, averaging roughly $20 per screen, making the budget difficult to recover.
Some of the best shots in Grok Imagine’s AI-made Odyssey don’t contain actors. Ancient landscapes stretch into the distance. Close-ups of grimy hands suggest people who have touched something rougher than a keyboard. For a few seconds, the illusion holds.
https://twitter.com/imagine/status/2113712964419063911
YouTube videos could soon look better without eating quite so much data, right? Thankfully, the platform plans to introduce a new video format called AV2 on its web player in early 2027, promising more efficient streaming and potentially fewer playback hiccups on slower internet connections. The big headline is a roughly 30% improvement in compression efficiency over AV1, YouTube's existing video format. That doesn't guarantee every video will use 30% less data, but it could make streaming a little easier on both internet connections and data allowances.
What is AV2, and why should viewers care?