Movie queues

I have been a Netflix subscriber for a few years now. Recently I switched to their streaming-only option. This was not in response to their restructuring their subscription prices. Rather, I found myself really not wanting to deal with those DVDs any longer. It was not that opening envelopes or carrying them to the mailbox had suddenly become a hassle (though there is maybe a little truth to that), more importantly: the queues simply did not work for me and the way I consumed them any longer.

Netflix’s streaming selection is large, but there are lots of titles that they only provide as DVD rentals. Earlier this year, I purchased an Apple TV. Among other things it offers the convenience to rent or purchase a movie and then just start watching it, streamed over the Internet. Even though this accrues a (relatively) small extra expense, getting the movie virtually immediately over Apple TV is much more convenient than waiting for a DVD in the mail.

That part is obvious, here is what is perhaps more interesting.

In How Online Companies Get You to Share More and Spend More, Dan Ariely discusses Netflix, among other companies. He explores the question of why Netflix users ended up renting fewer DVDs. The short answer: We are bad a predicting our own, future preferences.

There’s a beautiful paper by Daniel Read and two coauthors showing the gap between what people want to do in principle and what they want to do right now. They asked subjects to choose several films from a list containing a mix of highbrow titles (e.g., Schindler’s List) and lowbrow titles (e.g., My Cousin Vinny). When asked which film they wanted to watch a few days later, most picked a highbrow one. But when asked which they wanted to watch right now, most went lowbrow. In principle, we want to be the kind of people who watch serious movies, maybe even French ones—just not tonight! And so our queue becomes aspirational, filled with titles that are more ambitious than the ones we really want to watch.

The aforementioned paper goes by the title Mixing Virtue and Vice: Combining the Immediacy Effect and the Diversification Heuristic [PDF] and describes the study and the authors’ findings in more detail. It is absolutely worth reading.

I’m guessing there is more to it than just the pleasure/aspiration tradeoff. However, thinking about this a bit more I realize the following. Both my DVD queue and my Instant Queue contain well over 50 items. Whenever I do decide to watch a video these days, that movie is almost never in either queue though. I simply go with whatever I find most appealing at the time. I would like to think that low-brow entertainment is not generally winning over the high-brow variety, but I also have no evidence to prove that.

At times, it does seem as though my adding a movie to a queue can almost make it less likely for me to actually watch it.