Netflix Gets Social: “Extensive” Facebook Integration is Coming
Netflix revealed it is in the process of implementing “an extensive Facebook integration” on Wednesday, marking a significant change from its previous absence from the social Web. — Netflix's dramatic growth in user base …
Context & Ripple Effects
This is Netflix's second pass at Facebook. In March 2009 it shipped a lightweight Facebook Connect tie-up that let members push movie ratings to their profiles; what was announced this week is pitched as far more than rating-sharing, and explicitly framed as a reversal of the company's long absence from the social Web.
The timing tracks its scale: the ReadWriteWeb pickup pairs the announcement with the milestone that Netflix added 7.7 million subscribers in 2010 to pass 20 million. Meanwhile Facebook itself is busy converting user activity into commercial surface — it has just revived part of its discontinued Beacon program with a plan letting brands turn users' online activities into ads.
First-order effects
- Netflix's 20-million-plus member base gets its viewing and rating activity wired into Facebook's feed, ending the company's deliberate distance from social distribution.
- Facebook gains one of the largest subscription-media audiences as a native source of high-frequency, opinion-rich activity for its stream.
Second-order effects
- Every competing subscription video service now faces a discoverability gap against Netflix's socially-amplified catalog — staying off the social graph starts to look like a distribution decision rather than a privacy stance.
- With Facebook simultaneously building ad products out of user activity (the Beacon revival), the integration hands Facebook both the content signal and a monetization template for it — leverage Netflix does not control.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, what people watch becomes shareable and advertisable at platform scale, pushing video providers toward a structural choice: own the customer relationship or rent reach through the social graph.
- Sharing rental and viewing history also drags video privacy law back into play — how far regulators let platforms expose viewing behavior will shape how 'extensive' integrations like this can legally get.
The trend: Subscription media services are plugging their usage data into social platforms, making the social graph rather than the service itself the discovery layer for video.