Hulu Launches Like / Dislike Buttons to Drive More Personalized Discovery and Search

By Jason Wong, Director, Product Management

We know that today’s connected consumers expect a deeply personalized experience when they watch TV. At Hulu, we’ve always taken a unique approach to recommendations. It’s a combination of human curation, empowering our viewers, and algorithms that round out the personalized experiences we deliver to Hulu subscribers. 

This summer, we rolled out several improvements to our recommendation engine. For example, Hulu now considers when you watch and what you watch on to inform the recommendations that we serve to you. And over the next few months, we’ll be introducing even more enhancements to improve the way you search for and discover content — making it easier for you to revisit old favorites, find new ones, and even give us direct feedback on what you like and what you don’t.  These include:

Like / dislike buttons

The like / dislike buttons give you the opportunity to provide Hulu direct feedback on your recommendations. When you “like” a show or movie, we will suggest titles and shows that are similar to what you’ve liked. When you “dislike” a show or movie, we’ll make sure you don’t see that title again. We’re beginning to roll out this feature today on Hulu.com, Amazon Fire TV devices, XboxOne, Nintendo Switch, select LG, Samsung, and Android TVs, VIZIO SmartCast TVs, and Chromecast, with other devices coming soon.

A Unique Home Experience for Every Viewer

We’re also working on delivering a more tailored, personalized home experience for our viewers by displaying the most relevant collections for you and ordering them based on your watch preferences. As we roll this out, our viewers will not only be able to find their favorite shows and movies faster, but also see more diverse and relevant collections on Home. For animation fans, we’ll show the collection of animation programs higher on their Home, and for those who never watch Kids content, we’ll order the Kids collection lower on the page.

Improved Search 

Spell something wrong or made a mistake while typing in your TV? We’ll still help you find what you’re looking for. You want to type “HIMYM” instead of “How I Met Your Mother” to save time? We’re ready for that too! 

Over the next few months, we’ll be rolling out improvements to search to make it faster and easier to find what you’re looking for on Hulu. And we’ve already seen results. During testing, our team was able to identify and correct over 1,500 unique misspellings for “The Handmaid’s Tale”.

More Enhancements to Recommendations

We’ll be rolling out even more improvements to our recommendation engine to build collections tied to what you watched in the past and refine suggestions for content that’s Up Next. 

With all of these enhancements coming to Hulu, finding what you love to watch will be easier and faster than ever. 

But it doesn’t stop there. We’ll make sure you never miss breaking news or trending shows, because on top of our algorithmically-driven recommendations, we have a team of Hulugans hard at work find the shows and movies for you won’t want to miss. 

Recommendations and human curation work hand in hand at Hulu to deliver just the right mix of content for our viewers – personalized recommendations, curated collections, and everything in between.

With improved search and discovery coupled with content curated by our teams at Hulu, you’ll feel like your experience is the best blend of what you love and the shows and movies you can’t miss. Be on the lookout for these improvements and more, coming soon.