TV shows will be hits before they are even filmed

666 Park Avenue, Last Resort, The Mob Doctor, Mockingbird Lane, Partners, Alcatraz, Allen Gregory, Are You There Chelsea?, Awake, Bent, Best Friends Forever, Charlie’s Angels, The Finder, The Firm, Free Agents, GCB, I Hate My Teenage Daughter…

If you’ve seen any of these recent television flops you know how frustrating it can be to start watching a TV show that never makes it past the first season.

Now, thanks to “Algorithmic Programming”, failed shows may be a thing of the past…or at least less common.

Netflix’s “House of Cards”, the first major TV series released as an entire season (thirteen episodes) all at once, is also the first show developed with big data algorithms.

The New York Times explains:

Netflix, which has 27 million subscribers in the nation and 33 million worldwide, ran the numbers. It already knew that a healthy share had streamed the work of Mr. Fincher, the director of “The Social Network,” from beginning to end. And films featuring Mr. Spacey had always done well, as had the British version of “House of Cards.” With those three circles of interest, Netflix was able to find a Venn diagram intersection that suggested that buying the series would be a very good bet on original programming.

Jonathan Friedland, the company’s chief communications officer, said, “Because we have a direct relationship with consumers, we know what people like to watch and that helps us understand how big the interest is going to be for a given show. It gave us some confidence that we could find an audience for a show like ‘House of Cards.’ ”

And there are concerns that the same thing that makes Netflix so valuable — it knows everything about us — could create problems if it is not careful with our data and our privacy. But many think the trade is worth it.

“Netflix and Amazon know when you stop and start a program, whether you wanted the whole thing, all of that,” said Rick Smolan, whose most recent book was “The Human Face of Big Data.” “Programmers have been wandering out and shooting a shotgun into the night sky and hoping they hit something, and I end up paying $150 for channels full of nothing I want to watch. These guys know what they are aiming at.”

What do you think? Is it a scary idea that the future of “art” will be even more heavily data-driven – or will you just be happy to get better TV shows that don’t get cancelled?

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