All seven team members - Bob Bell, Martin Chabbert, Michael Jahrer, Yehuda Koren, Martin Piotte, Andreas Toscher and Chris Volinsky - attended the awards ceremony which was the first time all seven had met one another in person.

“We had a bona fide race right to the very end,” said Netflix Co-Founder and CEO Reed Hastings. “Teams that had previously battled it out independently joined forces to surpass the 10 percent barrier. New submissions arrived fast and furious in the closing hours and the competition had more twists and turns than ‘The Crying Game,’ ‘The Usual Suspects’ and all the ‘Bourne’ movies wrapped into one.”

That’s done, let’s have another contest

Just moments after granting the $1 million prize, Netflix announced a second $1 million challenge, asking the world’s computer science and machine learning communities to keep the improvements coming.

While the first Netflix Prize solved the tough challenge of accurately predicting movie enjoyment by Netflix members who have provided ratings on an average of 50 or more other movies, Netflix Prize 2 focuses on the much harder problem of predicting movie enjoyment by members who don’t rate movies often, or at all, by taking advantage of demographic and behavioral data carrying implicit signals about the individuals’ taste profiles.

As with the first Netflix Prize, the sequel will also be an open competition with winning teams owning their solution to license to Netflix and other companies. The company says that success in this problem will enable businesses to deliver superior service to new customers much sooner in their lifecycle, without requiring or waiting for the customer to provide the rich data points that underpinned the first Netflix Prize.

The new data set, providing more than 100 million data points, will include, among other things, information about renters’ ages, genders, ZIP codes, genre ratings and previously chosen movies. As with the first Netflix Prize, all data provided is anonymous and cannot be associated with a specific Netflix member.

Unlike the first challenge, this contest has no specific accuracy target. In fact, Netflix said today that the company and the judges have little idea how far the world’s foremost experts can push this data to derive useful predictions. Instead, $500,000 will be awarded to the team judged to be leading after six months and an additional $500,000 will be given to the team in the lead at the 18-month mark, when the contest is wrapped up.

Once again, Netflix will require the winning team to publish its methods.

Geez, if not a movie, maybe there’s a reality series in this. If the Amazing Race can keep winning Emmys …