the line between marketing and stupidity, said the sage, is thin and may only depend on a few bits.
Netflix has done it again.
In just under a brutal campaign encouraged by the media with enthusiasm, all of them in the heat of
clicks
in a
chat
,
Lupine
has managed to get all the attention.
If we accept the never-audited and opaque data of the platform itself, the French series by
George Kay and François Uzan
would have been seen by
70 million
people
with eyes and would have prepared, consequently, his next season for the summer.
Suddenly, a rabidly French production, riddled with Parisian jokes and starring an idol of Senegalese descent (
Omar sy
) monopolizes popularity previously only reserved for old Hollywood.
It would be, again, the success of
glocal
(the global and the local all united), the triumph of Big Data, the collateral virtue (rather than harm) of the famous and always demonized algorithm ... That or, why not, a sophisticated derivative of the much older trick of the
tocomocho
. «
The paper house
it was the first series to show that something like this was possible, "he says.
Elena Neira
, author of the reference book on the subject
Streaming Wars
(Planet).
For the expert, Álex Pina's production that took its first steps on Antena 3 and then literally exploded on Netflix was "patient zero."
In his opinion, and despite being the most evident proof of how the algorithmic architecture he seeks works while directly constructing the spectator's desires, the passive success that the adventures of The Professor and his own achieved by placing themselves at the head from the series
marathons
it was totally unexpected.
That is to say,
the algorithm does not predict everything.
And the same is applicable to the series of adolescent rage Elite, that to the German time travel series
Dark
or to the Brazilian dystopia
3%
.
Or, why not, to the Spanish film
The hole
or to
thriller
erotic polish
365 days
.
What if the success of Bong Joon-ho's Parasites also owed some of its ruthless popularity to a similar combination of bits? To put us, Netflix has pioneered employing what is supposed to be an army of '
taggers
'dedicated to watching programs and associating metadata through all kinds of labels, ranging from the presence of animals to the role played by women, whether it is period productions or whether there is an overabundance of unstructured families.
Along with them, would be, according to Neira, the '
juicers
', which would perform the same function but as regards the
"visual presentation"
.
And all this to discriminate until exhaustion and balance what is known about the habits, desires and desires of each user with each of the marked categories
bit
to
bit
So far, very summarized, the theory.
However, the father of
The paper house
Álex Pina does not hesitate to be skeptical in practice.
“I don't know how the algorithm works, or if it was the algorithm that brought the series to the public.
I suppose there is part of the algorithm that put the series before the eyes of many people, but I have always really thought that great events, which sometimes occur with movies or series,
they are gestated more in the mouth-ear »,
comments, takes a second and, perhaps to illustrate the unpredictability of almost everything, gives the exotic example of the
India
: «There, the phenomenon arrived very late.
In the premiere of the fourth season it was when the bombshell hit.
Either way, the roar reached his eardrums as he designed
White lines
with the British team of
The Crown
while leaving his eyebrows in the script and pre-production of
The Embarcadero.
And, suddenly, the amazement: «It all started when we saw at the carnival in Rio de Janeiro people disguised with the red monkeys ... Astonishment, yes, and disbelief at seeing a fan with the faces of the Professor and the band in
a stadium in Saudi Arabia ... »
The question now would be if, despite its bad press, the algorithm and its derivatives would not be a nice way to beat precisely the
algorithm
, but this time in italics.
Otherwise, isn't the reality of the algorithm much sweeter, more pleasant, and even beneficial than the image the algorithm has created of itself?
At the opposite pole would be
Filmin
, a Spanish and therefore local platform that has made cinephilia, good taste and exclusivity its brand.
They - like HBO, Netflix's great competitor - boast of not having such a thing (nor do they mention it).
Recommendations are made by people.
They and their mouths.
Mouth bits
so.
Jaume Ripoll,
Editorial director of Filmin, is convinced that the only obvious and hardly debatable victory is that of the story, that of the story of, again, the algorithm.
"Actually,
everything is part of a promotion mechanism
and sale that the media have bought.
The platform says that so many millions of people have seen anything because of the algorithm and there is no way to check.
And then that data becomes an incentive and appears reproduced in a thousand sites.
It's a question of money, "he says, taking Pina's skepticism to extremes that are hard to beat. Filmin disposed of his own uncalculated success this past summer.
And without algorithm of any kind.
Collapse
it was the French series far from clumsy shot-back-shot standards that reached the heights of the phenomenological.
“I remember that we began to negotiate their purchase in October 2019. They asked a lot.
Later, in the spring of 2020 and already in the midst of a pandemic, we signed it.
We launched it in July with great fear because we sensed that people would already be tired of so much disaster.
It was the peak of the second wave, and suddenly
all our fears were found to be unfounded »
, Ripoll recalls without hiding a hint of pleasure.
How to imagine that the real disaster would serve as a spur and inadvertent publicity campaign for the fictional apocalypse?
Isn't this example the clearest proof that there is no algorithm capable of predicting success? Neira, for her part, as a feverish observer, prefers to give what seems to be working a chance: the algorithm, without the italics that adds the story or advertising.
In his view, too many unfair things are being said about the ill-fated selection mechanism (that is).
The advantages of having a screening prior to the exasperating volume of productions, he reasons, is a gift of the only thing that nobody has: time.
«The phenomenon of
glocal
on the other hand, it fosters and expands opportunities and creates a new standard in which the user feels comfortable being close, ”he says.
And then he points out that in the new arrangement of what appears to be an obvious audiovisual bubble with
Disney +, Apple, HBO +, Peacock and even Quibi
To add to those that were already there (Netflix, Amazon and even YouTube), the strategy of looking for new content and away from the American industrial center to be distributed around the world is not only a happy consequence of the universe of platforms but also the sense business itself.
Netflix and Amazon, for example, have no other choice, since they do not have their own catalog. From a new perspective, that of the independent film distributor (not series) who sees how much of his business soon passes through a platform, José Tito, from
The adventure
, it cannot but warn of new dangers.
«What is clear is that the tendency is to standardize the language.
What we observe is that it happens like in football.
When the field is muddy and in poor condition the distances between teams are shortened.
Good films lose when viewed at home anyway, and bad movies win a bit, ”he says in a brand-free metaphorical exercise.
He talks about cinema in general and about
Parasites
, its great success as a distributor, in particular.
Without being comparable measures, the truth is that Bong Joon-ho's film was read by many as the beginning of a new world order: a Korean film accepted by all, including Hollywood.
And first in the cinema and then, indeed, on the platforms.
In all of them.
Tito does not know if it is a matter of the algorithm, but he is clear that the supposed diversity is just that: supposed.
At his side, Ripoll insists on the same idea.
«Before Bergman or Kim Ki-duk were mainstreams, now they are not.
It is not the nationality,
it is the narration that is simplified »
, he comments precisely and adds a new metaphor: "Abba was not heard before because they were Swedish, but for elevating global pop to paroxysm".
Stanislaw Lem
imagined a literature
bitic
written exclusively by computers and for computers.
What began as a human servitude thanks to the Big Data that we segregate in our wandering through the network soon became independent of the limits and anthropological desires to compose its own philosophy, science and even theology
bitic
.
Who knows if when the bubble bursts (right now, according to Pina, an outrageous 5,000 series are being produced in the industrialized world), the algorithm will become independent from us.
And he will live alone and without men to instruct
more or less
glocally
.
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