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The Netflix contest was significant as a test case for new ideas about how to efficiently foster innovation in the Internet era - notably, offering prizes as an incentive and encouraging online collaboration to tap minds worldwide. The lessons of the Netflix contest could extend well beyond improving movie picks. The researchers from around the world were grappling with a huge data set - 100 million movie ratings - and the challenges of large-scale modeling, which can be applied across the fields of science, commerce and politics.

The article covers Netflix, whose CEO was named "Business person of the year" for 2010. Netflix is an interesting case study from the perspective of innovation. It has entered the DVD rental market with a business model innovation (i.e. sending DVDs to subscribers through the postal service) that disrupted incumbents such as Blockbuster. At the same time, it has realized that this innovation could be only transient, since the diffusion of broadband would have quickly led to the new paradigm of "on demand" or "streaming" content. So, it is a case of a disruptive innovator that is not afraid of rapidly disrupting the same business model on which it has built its own fortune.

An article on the broadcasting vs. streaming revolution. Interesting to notice that established cable TV operators are quite behind. Conversely, a young company like Netflix, that started by challenging Blockbuster in DVD rentals with an innovative business model, is a nimble player with interesting results. A clear example of organisational inertia

Alex Goldfayn's new book is called Evangelist Marketing: What Apple Amazon and Netflix Understand About Their Customers (That Your Company Probably Doesn't). He is CEO of the Evangelist Marketing Institute, a marketing consultancy with clients that include T-Mobile, TiVo and Logitech. You remember, don't you? The emails magically appeared while you weren't looking.