At Netflix, big data can affect even the littlest things — Tech News and Analysis [GigaOM]

Perhaps the NSA should outsource to Netflix; check the full article for more Netflix big data analysis details

"Netflix executives are kind of vague when discussing just what it knows about what viewers want, but you can get a pretty good idea by looking at the data science behind the company’s vaunted recommendation system. Here is a list of things Netflix tracks, according to one of the company’s former data scientists presenting at last year’s Hadoop Summit:
More than 25 million users
About 30 million plays per day (and it tracks every time you rewind, fast forward and pause a movie)
More than 2 billion hours of streaming video watched during the last three months of 2011 alone
About 4 million ratings per day
About 3 million searches per day
Geo-location data
Device information
Time of day and week (it now can verify that users watch more TV shows during the week and more movies during the weekend)
Metadata from third parties such as Nielsen
Social media data from Facebook and Twitter"

At Netflix, big data can affect even the littlest things — Tech News and Analysis