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Netflix awards $1 million in recommendation contest

By Amarendra Bhushan for CEOWORLD Magazine Updated:September 22, 2009

The challenge was to improve the way in which the company website predicts customers’ movie preferences and recommends other films.

Since its launch three years ago, more than 51,000 contestants worldwide have tried to solve it.

Technically however, it had drawn with a rival group called the Ensemble at a 10.6 percent improvement, but it was declared the winner at an awards ceremony on Monday because it submitted its final entry just a few minutes before Ensemble managed to.

Netflix has more than 100,000 films and TV shows available, so making improvements to its recommendation system is far from easy, but will undoubtedly result in long-term revenue gains that easily surpass $1 million.

Under contest rules, in the event of a tie, the first team past the post was the winner. “That 20 minutes was worth a million dollars,” Reed Hastings, chief executive of Netflix, said at a news conference in New York.

Yet the scientists and engineers on the second-place team, and the employers who gave many of them the time and freedom to compete in the contest, were hardly despairing.

The winning team, BellKor, met each other for the first time at an awards ceremony held in New York on Monday.

Seven technology professionals are $1 million richer Monday after Netflix awarded them with its coveted Netflix Prize, which sought a 10 percent improvement in the company’s recommendation engine.

Netflix also announced plans for a second prize, which will dole out another $1 million in two rounds over the next two years.

The winners are part of a team known as “BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos,” a team of software and electrical engineers, statisticians and machine learning researchers from Austria, Canada, Israel and the United States, Chloe Albanesius wrote.

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