Looking to improve the personalized recommendations process, Netflix on Monday announced the Netflix Prize, a $1 million contest that awards the first researcher who can reach a certain level of accuracy in recommending movie picks.

After a period of significant advancement in the field, innovation has slowed dramatically. Thus, the Los Gatos, Calif. based movie rental firm was spurred to create the contest to urge researchers to look into better ways to employ recommendation systems.

To assist researchers, 100 million anonymous movie ratings were released, ranging from one to five stars. A system must be at least ten percent more accurate than Netflix's current method in order to be eligible to win. The result would be published publicly, Netflix says.

Netflix attempted to allay privacy concerns by stating that all personal information was removed from the reviews; only the titles, star ratings and dates were made available to researchers. No text reviews were provided.

"Recommendation systems covering a wide variety of categories will play an increasingly significant commercial role in the future," said Netflix Co- Founder, Chairman and CEO Reed Hastings. "Right now, we're driving the Model T version of what is possible. We want to build a Ferrari and establishing the Netflix Prize is a first step."

Figuring out what a consumer may or may not like is usually based on a mathematical formula that takes into account the users past actions and compares it to other users with similar tastes. From there, the system guesses what other items the user may like or want.

The contest is only open to those outside of the company, and if no one meets the ten percent threshold, the company would award a "progress prize" to the closest person, and would do so annually until the grand prize is won.

Netflix's prize is very similar to other prizes offered for difficult tasks. Two years ago, the Ansari X Prize awarded $10 million to the first person to build a reusable spacecraft. Other multi-million dollar contests include one to build robotic vehicles, and building equipment for use in space exploration.