The Winning $1M Netflix Prize Methods Published

In case you've been living under a hole, today Netflix formally awarded the $1M dollar prize to BellKor. See the NYTimes article. Wired has a picture of the team, which met for the first time to receive the award.

The top finishing teams recently published papers outlining their strategies via the Netflix Prize Forum message.

• Y. Koren, "The BellKor Solution to the Netflix Grand Prize", (2009).
• A. Töscher, M. Jahrer, R. Bell, "The BigChaos Solution to the Netflix Grand Prize", (2009).
• M. Piotte, M. Chabbert, "The Pragmatic Theory solution to the Netflix Grand Prize", (2009).

I look forward to hearing more about the second iteration of the contest! From the NY Times article it will be a different:

The new contest is going to present the contestants with demographic and behavioral data, and they will be asked to model individuals’ “taste profiles,” the company said. The data set of more than 100 million entries will include information about renters’ ages, gender, ZIP codes, genre ratings and previously chosen movies.