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Now, if you were Netflix (or Popcorn Time), you could just show them the series directly in the app and people would come to your app to watch the series, and also get the recommendations. They'd come back more often if you had good recommendations. People just don't want standalone recommendations.

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flir 4 hours ago | parent [-]

There's also the fact that more data == better recommedations.

Even if people wanted your standalone app, they're not going to sit and enter the kind of rich data a decent recommendation engine needs. It really has to be a tool that gathers data about you as a side-effect of you using it.

	▲	immibis 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Well, there's "enter your Netflix username and password here" This has severely fallen out of fashion since the 2000s, but it used to be not uncommon that when one web app wanted to do actions on your behalf on another web app, it would just take your username and password and log in as you. According to Cory Doctorow (I wasn't there) Facebook did this to MySpace. For Netflix in particular, logging in from your server would probably trigger anti-account-sharing, but you could avoid that by making the requests you need from the user's app on their device, not from your server. I think the industry feels like it's illegal now, but I don't think it's actually illegal? since there's no criminal intent. I don't think it's the same, legally, as when a criminal steals your login details and logs in as you. But I'm not a lawyer and this is not legal advice. But my evidence is that there are apps (e.g. POLi) that do this with bank accounts and still don't seem to be in any trouble. Even the banks don't seem to be locking it out as that would hurt the customer's relationship with the bank.