It wouldn't necessarily even have to beat it -- you could use synergy.
For example: here are movies a bunch of your friends are watching, and here's how much we estimate you'll like each one. Or, to flip it around, out of all the movies we think you'll like, here are the ones that have the strongest buzz amongst people you know.
Anything that gets people excited about watching movies is good for Netflix, and should be something they can monetize.
You could do the same thing with YouTube videos, or with a music service. Instead of having people send you a bunch of annoying "Hey check this out" messages (by whatever messaging medium), you could look at a widget that shows the current favorites amongst your friends. Sure, a Netflix-style rating service may be more accurate, but a lot of people want to know what their friends recommend.
Doesn't Netflix already do this? I think you can already friend everyone there and see what they watched, how they rated it, what they put in their queue. Why would they pay Facebook for that?
Pretty sure YouTube and some music services have some of this sort of functionality too. Every site does these days.
For example: here are movies a bunch of your friends are watching, and here's how much we estimate you'll like each one. Or, to flip it around, out of all the movies we think you'll like, here are the ones that have the strongest buzz amongst people you know.
Anything that gets people excited about watching movies is good for Netflix, and should be something they can monetize.
You could do the same thing with YouTube videos, or with a music service. Instead of having people send you a bunch of annoying "Hey check this out" messages (by whatever messaging medium), you could look at a widget that shows the current favorites amongst your friends. Sure, a Netflix-style rating service may be more accurate, but a lot of people want to know what their friends recommend.