On 25th July 2018, Netflix announced on its official YouTube channel that it was going to put new profile icons in place for its subscribers. In a short video, the streaming platform challenged its users to ‘keep owning Netflix!’
Discover our latest podcast
The Netflix team have looked back on the evolution of Profiles launched in 2013, and announced how they would make this experience even more personalised for its clients. With this in mind, the organisation stated that it wanted to launch a feature allowing a single person to create different profiles.
‘You can create different profiles to match your mood!’ announces the American streaming giant, as a reminder that Netflix clients have the option of creating up to 5 profiles, whether they use a basic one-screen subscription (£7.99 monthly), a two-screen subscription (£10.99 monthly) or a four-screen subscription (£13.99 monthly).
In order for the recommendation system to find content which is best adapted to subscribers’ interests, Netflix suggests subscribers should create profiles which are named and targeted according to taste, like ‘comedies,’ ‘thrillers,’ or ‘documentaries.’ On your ‘thriller’ profile, you would be able to watch films designed to make you shudder, and as the algorithm would see which content you liked, the platform would recommend more and more similar content.
By encouraging its users to create targeted and specific profiles, Netflix is trying to make life easier for itself, because it won’t have to change the recommendation system if it simplifies the way its predictions are made.