Netflix, the movie rental company, announced on Monday that a seven-man team was the winner of its closely watched three-year contest to improve its Web site’s movie recommendation system. That was expected, but the surprise was in the nail-biter finish.
The losing team, as it turned out, precisely matched the performance of the winner, but submitted its entry 20 minutes later, just before the final deadline expired.
Under contest rules, in the event of a tie, the first team past the post was the winner. “That 20 minutes was worth a million dollars,” Reed Hastings, chief executive of Netflix, said at a news conference in New York.
