Netflix pushed Congress to allow its users to automatically share their viewing habits on Facebook when they linked their account with the social network. Sounds like it was a wasted effort.
Netflix CEO: Facebook Auto-Sharing “Hasn’t Yet Panned Out”
Turns out people don’t want to publicize everything they do.
Asa Mathat
Jason Del Rey has been a business journalist for 15 years and has covered Amazon, Walmart, and the e-commerce industry for the last decade. He was a senior correspondent at Vox.
The company’s CEO, Reed Hastings, acknowledged at the inaugural Code Conference that only “a few people” are using this auto-sharing feature and that it “hasn’t yet panned out.” Hastings also sits on Facebook’s board of directors.
The integration was part of a larger initiative that Facebook pushed in 2011 with its Open Graph connections for developers, a plan that let connected apps auto-share what users were doing on Facebook. So if you connected Netflix, for example, any shows you watched on the service would be auto-shared to your Facebook network.
That required some work on Netflix’s behalf, including lobbying Congress to change existing legislation in order for Netflix to make this possible for U.S. users. Those efforts worked. But auto-sharing hasn’t.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
