Why Just for Kids is such a big deal for Netflix

Xbox users can now browse kids titles on Netflix without stumbling across old B-movies that happen to have the same title, thanks to Netflix’s Just for Kids interface that just arrived on the game console. No kids? No worries. Your personal profile could be next.

Netflix’s Just for Kids user interface is coming to the Xbox, the company announced Wednesday, making it possible for Netflix subscribers to browse through kids titles on their Xbox 360 without seeing any inappropriate content. That’s great news for any family household with an Xbox, but it also points to much bigger plans to further personalize your Netflix experience.

Just for Kids replaces the traditional Netflix catalog grid with a more playful user interface. TV shows can be discovered by character, and each and every episode can be previewed with an image — no reading skills necessary. Xbox users can decide whether they want to access Just for Kids or the regular Netflix UI every time they start the app, or switch to the kids UI at any point. Check out the new UI in this video provided by Netflix:

Just for Kids was first introduced on the web, and has since been rolled out to the PS3, the Wii, the Apple TV, the Boxee Box and a whole bunch of other devices. It makes a lot of sense for Netflix, because kids content has proven to be extremely popular on the service — to the point where some wonder whether it is stealing away viewers from Nickelodeon.

But there’s more to it: Just for Kids also represents a first step towards a more tailored Netflix experience. Netflix has in the past put a lot of energy into personalization on the account level. It tracks every rating, every video played and pretty much everything else you’re doing on the service to recommend titles you might like.

Do your Netflix recommendations look like mine? No worries, help is on the way.

But if you have kids that watch a lot of Netflix, you’ll find that this system doesn’t really work. Sooner or later, all your recommendations are going to be about Hello Kitty, My Little Pony and Shaun the Sheep. The same is true for couples’ households, where Netflix can have a hard time recommending things that matter to both partners.

Netflix has said in the past that it wants to solve this problem by taking its personalization to the next level. Instead of just recommending titles based on your account, the company is considering the introduction of profiles for each and every family member in the household — complete with separate queues and recommendations. Netflix has said that it is going to test these kinds of profiles later this year.

Why has it taken Netflix so long? Because this one is actually a tough problem to crack: To make personalization down to every member of the family work, users have to identify themselves when they’re watching, so Netflix knows whose behavior it is tracking. And that’s where Just for Kids comes in. Once a child has selected the separate UI, Netflix can also track its viewing separately and make sure that its titles don’t show up in its parent’s recently watched list.

But here’s the catch: The vast majority of Netflix viewing happens on TVs and connected devices these days, and chances are, there’s more than one person watching. Sometimes the whole family might want to watch a kids movie. Sometimes it’s just the kids by themselves. Sometimes you’re going to watch something together with your partner, while at other times you want to geek out on your own personal interests. Balancing this without making the experience too complicated is going to be a challenge for Netflix.

The good news is that Just for Kids might just be the first step to take on this challenge.

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Hastings was right: Olympics drop Netflix traffic 25%, study says

ISP technology provider Procera Networks reports that Netflix streaming was down a quarter from normal levels in the U.S. Sunday, even though overall streaming video traffic was way up. Of course, last week, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said there’d be days like this.

Forget Mad Men reruns. The individual mixed dressage events are on tonight!

As predicted by Netflix CEO Reed Hastings last week, interest in the London Olympic Games seems to be sapping away significant viewership on his streaming service.

Also read: Netflix stock down 25 percent as investors lament return to red ink

A study issued Wednesday by Procera Networks, which sells packet sniffing gear to internet service providers — research first reported Wednesday by entertainment trade publication Variety – revealed that Netflix streaming traffic was down 25 percent on Sunday from normal levels.

Usage stayed normal in Canada, Procera also found.

“This matches expectations, as the U.S. is much more involved in the Olympics than Canada, and with the peak levels that we mentioned earlier for Olympics streaming, something had to give, and in this case it was Netflix,” wrote Cam Cullen, the Boston-based VP of global marketing for Procera.

Of course, media companies vested in coverage of the Olympics on digital platforms, such as Comcast/NBCUniversal and Yahoo, 9s YHOO) are seeing big usage spikes, Procera adds.

“In the U.S., several networks peaked as high as 34 percent of overall bandwidth and increased volume by over 100 percent over the initial two days of events,” Cullen wrote.

Meanwhile, in the U.K., usage on BBC iPlayer was up 100 percent on all platforms Sunday during coverage of soccer events.

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Here comes Max: How Netflix wants to gamify your movie recommendations

Netflix has been quietly testing a new approach towards personalized movie and TV show recommendations: The company recently launched a game show host-like personal assistant dubbed Netflix Max on the PS3 that uses gamification to get users to rate more movies and find better content.

Netflix Max, which was first spotted by The Noisecast, has been made available to some PS3 owners through the most recent update to the company’s PS3 app. We just checked and didn’t have access to Max yet, but early users have been describing it as a kind of You don’t know Jack meets Siri: Max audibly talks to viewers and prompts them to answer a number of questions to find new movies. Netflix clearly emphasises the gamification aspect, even prompting users to “play Max” in the PS3’s home menu, and turning movie rating into “The Ratings Game.”

Check out a video of the new feature recorded by Scott Daly below:

PS3 owners apparently need version 2.08 of the Netflix app to have access to Max, and it doesn’t seem to be enabled by default for every user. The Noisecast blog was told by a Netflix customer service representative that users with the 2.08 update update can easily gain access to Max even if it’s not part of their home menu by pressing the “square” button on their remote control, but we weren’t able to replicate this, despite running that very version of Netflix’s app on our PS3.

A company spokesperson told me via email that it’s not been decided whether it will be made available on other devices as well:

“Max is a new user experience we are testing. It is available to a subset of Netflix members who use a PS3. We will look at how the test performs, whether it leads to increased interaction with Netflix by our members, and decided based on that whether we will make it broadly available.”

Netflix has long worked on fine-tuning its recommendation engine, but hasn’t innovated as much on how these recommendations are served to the user. A feature like Max could be an interesting way to improve both: Users won’t have to browse through tons of recommendations, and Netflix learns even more about their preferences.

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Netflix experiments with crowd-sourced captioning

Netflix wants your help – and we are not talking about its troubled stock: The company is looking for volunteers to join its crowdsourced subtitling community. It’s all just an experiment for now, but it could one day become a massively crowdsourced closed captioning operation.

Netflix just launched a subtitling community project on the video captioning service Amara, formerly known as Universal Subtitles. The company is looking for a limited number of volunteers on the site, and apparently wants to try using crowd-sourced captioning with a “popular 80s cartoon and other classic TV programming,” according to information posted on the site.

A Netflix spokesperson told me that the company’s efforts on the site simply represent a test:

“Netflix is committed to accessibility and we have decided to test Amara to see if it could work for Netflix content. This is a small scale, early stage test. It is premature to discuss if we would actually use the titles resulting from this test or any future use of Amara.”

Netflix’s captioning community on Amara currently only features one video, which according to information provided on the site represents “an example of Netflix SDH (Subtitles for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing) Guidelines in action.”

Netflix is known as a company that is obsessed with testing. That being said, a service like Amara could represent a significant opportunity for Netflix. The company currently offers close to 50,000 movies and TV show episodes in the U.S., and has been expanding to countries where customers speak French, Spanish and Portuguese over the last few months. Netflix is slated to announce another international expansion soon, which could add another language to its roster.

Crowd-sourced captioning and subtitle translation could help to provide closed captions in all of these markets, and alleviate the pressure it’s been facing from deaf and hard-of-hearing advocates. Netflix was sued for not providing captions for all of its videos a year ago, and a judge allowed the lawsuit to proceed last month.

Amara originally launched as Universal Subtitles, and allows users to transcribe videos with a simple online editor. The site has been used by media organizations like Al Jazeera and the PBS NewsHour as well as the popular education site Khan Academy to crowd-source captioning and translation. I’ve been told by the Amara folks that its community has now subtitled more than 100,000 videos total.

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