Netflix Prize Competition Closes - But No Winner Announced Yet

After almost three years, and 44,014 entries from 5,169 teams in 186 countries, the Netflix Prize competition is now closed. Don't know about the Netflix Prize? Read on.

Jon Sanders here. I'm the engineer in charge of the Netflix ratings database and one of the people overseeing the Netflix Prize, which has been a world-wide competition launched in October 2006 to determine who can improve upon the Netflix recommendations system by ten percent. The contest made available to contestants 100 million anonymous movie ratings ranging from one to five stars, the largest such data set ever released. All personal information identifying individual Netflix members was removed from the prize data, which contained only movie titles, star ratings and dates but no text reviews.

The winning team will take home $1 million and Netflix members will benefit as we will incorporate the winner's technology in our recommendations system to continually improve the movie recommendations we make for you.

We'll announce the winner of the Netflix Prize in a few weeks after the submissions have been validated by a team of senior engineers from Netflix and distinguished researchers from the Machine Learning community. Stay tuned for more information, or check www.netflixprize.com if you want to get into the technical details.