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Netflix Knows It Only Has About a Minute to Grab Your Attention

It’s Friday night, it was a long week, and your couch is calling your name.
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It’s Friday night, it was a long week, and your couch is calling your name. You’ve got your takeout and a bottle of wine, your sweatpants on and the remote in-hand. Now, if only you could find something good to watch on Netflix. You search and search and after nearly two minutes, you give up.

Netflix knows you do this, and the company has just revamped its recommendation system so it won’t lose you and your increasingly divided attention. Tech Insider has the full story:

Researchers at the company have found that if a typical subscriber doesn't find something to watch in about 60 or 90 seconds, they could lose interest and move on to something else, like a video game, a book, or even old-fashioned TV."The user either finds something of interest [within the first 60 or 90 seconds] or the risk of the user abandoning our service increases substantially," Neil Hunt, Netflix's chief product officer, and Carlos Gomez-Uribe wrote recently in the journal ACM Transactions on Management Information Systems.

Related: Are You On an Old Netflix HD Plan? Expect to Pay $2 More

“The personalized recommendations we offer members are central to the Netflix experience, helping people find something great to watch quickly and easily,” Gomez-Uribe wrote in a blog post on Feb. 17. “After an entire year, efforts from dozens of teams across the company, and intensive research, we developed and deployed a global recommendation system that will benefit Netflix members across the world.”

Editor's Note: This story has been updated to appropriately attribute reporting from Tech Insider.