Lost in the Stream: How Algorithms Redefined the Way Movies Are Made and Watched (Creating a Watch List, Film Lovers Gift) - Softcover

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Jeff Rauseo was born in Massachusetts and now lives in southern New Hampshire with his wife, Coryana, and their two children, Sam and Hannah. A lifelong movie enthusiast, he has been creating content online about his passion for film and physical media since 2015. Lost in the Stream is his debut book. He has a bachelor’s in political science from the University of Massachusetts Lowell. When he isn’t watching movies or creating content, he works in digital marketing.

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Part 2: The Algorithms and the Streaming Revolution
How did you first hear about the last movie that you watched? It could have been from someone like me, sharing a video about a hidden gem or a new movie I was excited about. It could have been an article from Variety or The Hollywood Reporter that was shared on social media. It could have been from a paid advertisement that popped up when you opened Instagram, or a teaser playing ahead of the next YouTube video you planned to watch. Maybe you were on Reddit and scrolled through a popular thread on movies, or saw that someone posted a new movie poster release. Chances are, no matter which way you found the movie, it was through an online source driven by algorithms.

It is the 21st century after all, and we are all chronically online. That is how we get our information. Newspapers have become blogs, talk shows have become podcasts and YouTube channels, and commercials on cable TV have become paid partnerships with influencers on social media. For better or worse, the world is changing, and those of us who have lived over the last 20-30 years have been right in the middle of the biggest and fastest changes in technology and the dissemination of information that the world has ever seen.

However, the world of movies has changed even faster with the “Streaming Revolution," a shift that has brought more drastic changes to the entertainment industry than the previous 100 years that came before it. The Streaming Revolution was not brought on by the movie studios and production companies. It was brought on by technology companies, and as a result, our entertainment delivery systems shifted from a world of theaters and video tapes to a world of subscriptions, software, and algorithms.

Although we are all online and getting huge downloads of information every day, chances are that in the past few years, your taste in movies and what you decide to watch has been affected more by machine learning and algorithms than any blogs or social media posts. And the scary part is, you may not even realize what this revolution is doing to you and your tastes, and how drastically it has changed the way you consume your favorite media.

Just like on social media, you are not in control of what gets put in front of you on a streaming service. When you open up Netflix or Hulu, the titles that you see presented first are the ones that each service thinks you are most likely to watch based on your previous viewing habits. In many cases, these platforms also have additional data that they can use to push certain content, and you might be surprised at how much they know about you.
As someone who works in digital marketing for a living, I have been behind the scenes of many marketing platforms that collect data on just about everyone. With the current internet privacy laws in the United States and Canada, there are not many limitations to what can be collected. Once you click that annoying banner on every website that asks if it is okay to collect “cookies," you are being tracked.

I know not everyone fully understands how this all works, so let me break it down for you in layman’s terms. To my fellow digital marketing friends out there, just bear with me for a moment. I know it is a lot more complicated than what I am about to say, but we aren’t all digital marketing nerds.
For reference, cookies are basically small pieces of tracking code that are built into websites and allow them to see where you came from, how you got there, where you are located, and some other basic information based on your activities online.

If you have a Facebook account, a Gmail account, or any other social media platform, they all use cookies as well, and most modern websites have integrated that code into their own sites. For example, if you click an article from Facebook, and it brings you to The New York Times, Facebook knows what you clicked on and what you read. Depending on your privacy settings, The Times may also know exactly who you are from the information that Facebook has collected and shared with The Times. This can vary depending on the website’s own privacy policies, but be honest, have you ever actually read one of those?