Netflix Awards Tech Prize After Three Years, Launches New Contest

Some contests take a day or a week or a few months. But for online movie rental company Netflix, which had a dream and $1 million to spend, a contest to boost its technology took three years.

The quest was to improve the company's user recommendation system, and this week, the world's biggest Web movie rental service awarded its mammoth prize to a team of stat experts, researchers and engineers who figured out how to boost accuracy by 10 percent.

The winning team, BellKor's Pragmatic Chaos, surpassed the efforts of 40,000 other teams representing 180 countries who all participated in the contest initially launched in the fall of 2006.

Netflix co-founder and CEO Reed Hastings called the contest a bona fide race "right to the end."

"Teams that had previously battled it out independently joined forces to surpass the 10 percent barrier. New submissions arrived fast and furious in the closing hours and the competition had more twists and turns than 'The Crying Game,' 'The Usual Suspects' and all the 'Bourne' movies wrapped into one," he said in a press statement released yesterday when the prize was awarded.

Minutes after congratulating the winning team, Netflix leaders announced the second contest effort, Netflix Prize 2, this time focused on predicting members' enjoyment who don't share feedback through a rating system. The goal is about providing improved customer service faster and without customer input.

But this time the award won't be tied to specific levels of achievement, such as the first contest, as it's clearly tough to derive predictions when you don't have much to go on. The second contest, however, is only slated to last a year and a half and the award will be divvied up to the team leading at the six-month point and the winner at the conclusion.Photo courtesy of Netflix