Did you ever watch a movie and suddenly want to tell all of your friends about it?
Well, Netflix wants to make it easier for customers to share their favorite shows on Facebook so the experience becomes much more personalized.
The new Netflix social recommendation feature, which launches Tuesday, will allow subscribers to easily, and privately, recommend shows to the people they care about.
“When you finish watching something, you’ll be asked if you know anyone else who’d like that show, and prompted to find your friends by connecting to Facebook,” Cameron Johnson, director of product innovation at Netflix, told Loyalty360. “At Netflix, we believe that great stories have the power to connect us with the people we care about.”
The automatic disclosures will end Tuesday as Netflix launches its new system that empowers subscribers to select which friends will receive their video recommendations. A menu of friends culled from Facebook will appear after Netflix subscribers finish watching a video if they have turned on the sharing feature.
After selecting friends from a row of their pictures, and adding an optional message, subscribers simply click Send. Their friends will receive the recommendation the next time they log into Netflix.
For friends who have not yet connected Netflix and Facebook, Netflix will send the recommendation as a private message to Facebook Messenger.
The feature is available on the website, iPad, iPhone, PS3, Xbox, and many set-top boxes and smart TVs. Netflix will add additional platforms in the coming months.
Netflix began offering the Facebook sharing option to subscribers outside the U.S. in 2011. U.S. subscribers got that option 18 months ago.
The Facebook recommendations are limited to subscribers of Netflix video-streaming service, which costs $8 or $9 per month in the U.S. The streaming service has 50 million subscribers worldwide. There are no plans to extend the Facebook recommendations to the shrinking DVD-by-mail service.
Netflix ended June with 6.3 million DVD subscribers, or less than half the number it had three years ago.
Cliff Edwards, Director of Corporate Communications and Technology at Netflix, told Loyalty360 that Netflix regularly tests its products with viewers through A/B testing “where some viewer see the items we are thinking of rolling out globally months before we actually do. The goals are to foster conversation around Netflix programming in a fun, non-intrusive way.”