Peeking Into Netflix Queues

There is an interesting article in the New York Times today that uses Google Maps based data visualizations to show neighborhood by neighborhood Netflix rental patterns in 12 major U.S. cities. For the selected city you can roll around the map to see the most rented movie by zip code or sort them by most rented, alphabetical or meta score and then use the slider to go through the 50 movies listed. As someone who often uses streaming platforms to enjoy the latest movies and TV shows online, it was fascinating to see which films that the different areas surveyed have watched the most. I would be particularly intrigued to see if a study that used data from other websites like The Pirate Bay would generate similar results. Quite often people that use websites such as The Pirate Bay have to use proxy servers to access geographically restricted content so it would be interesting to see whether this would influence the popularity of any films. Anyway, by looking at New York you see interesting trends in some shows like Mad Men. Mad Men is almost exclusively concentrated in Manhattan. However, Obsessed was concentrated in Brooklyn and New Jersey, and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button was seen by everyone everywhere. How fascinating!