A nice new interactive visualization up on the New York Times allows you to pick a movie from 2009 and then see how often it was rented in various US metropolitan areas. The movies can be sorted by most to least rented, alphabetical, or by Metacritic score, and the resulting heatmaps cover 12 cities across the US and break the results down by zip code.
The visualization itself is impressive, but the data is a bit creepy. Any NetFlix users see this as an invasion of privacy? (even thought it was presented as aggregate data, the top 50 rentals in each zip code).
Fascinating! It’s really interesting to compare the viewing habits of different areas. You can clearly see divides between wealthy and poor, white and black, old and young based simply on Netflix habits. Just look at how the movies are segregated into stereotypes (e.g. areas that rented “Frost/Nixon” and areas that rented anything by Tyler Perry)