Posted on June 15, 2008
Netflix Feedin' me RSS with FeedFlix
BY BEN CASTELLI
A few months back Stepan showed me interesting new service called FeedFlix. It uses the power of RSS to parse data out of Netflix RSS feeds in order to aggregate and show you some of your basic Netflix user stats. For example I hold onto a movie for an average of 11 days before returning it, average .875 DVD returns each week and 2.33 DVD returns each month. I have been seriously slacking on my Netflix watching recently! In fact according to FeedFlix I am spending $6.08 per movie at this rate… not so hot.
As of now, FeedFlix is still pretty basic in terms of social networking, but it really opened my eyes to fact that Netfix actually had personal and public RSS feeds. They are buried way down in the footer navigation of Netflix.com, which is not surprising as I would imagine the majority of users have yet to adopt the use of an RSS reader.
There are a variety of personal feeds such as Recommendations and Queue in addition to public feeds (new releases, top 25). Adding these feeds to my reader has really saved a bunch of time and streamlined my Netflix usage. I can quickly check out some recommendations and new releases and only if I see something I like do I need to go to Netflix.com. Hopefully this will increase/improve my movie watching make the most of my Netflix subscription.
It is great to see Netflix using RSS and it would be cool if they would highlight this feature more prominently. Perhaps similar to the recommendation engine challenge, they can have a RSS integration challenge to incorporate and explain their RSS technology and get more people using it.
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Interesting! Quite amazing what you can pull with RSS these days. Would be nice to see some comparisons between Netflix and Blockbuster...