The movie-streaming service is dumping its old five-star system for the Facebook-like thumb system.<\/b>
The masses have spoken.
At Netflix, the stars are out.
Not movie stars, per se, but rather the streaming service’s system for rating the programs they watched with one to five stars. Instead, users will soon be able to express their level of enjoyment with a thumbs up for favorable or a thumbs down for unfavorable.
\u00ab\u00a0Five stars feels very yesterday now,\u00a0\u00bb Todd Yellin, Netflix’s vice president of product innovation, told a group of journalists at the company’s Los Gatos headquarters on Thursday. That system \u00ab\u00a0really projects what you think you want to tell the world. But we want to move to a system where it’s really clear, when members rate, that it’s for them, and to keep on making the Netflix experience better and better. \u00a0\u00bb
The company had beta tested the Facebook-like system with hundreds of thousands of new users around the world last year, finding that more than 200 percent more ratings were logged with the thumb system than the star system.
Netflix also plans to start displaying a match rating that will predict how likely a viewer is to enjoy a particular title. Programs with less than a 50 percent match won’t have the percentage shown, according to Variety.
The new rating system is expected to roll out in the coming weeks.<\/p>\n