Hey, why did you store all of the user's movie-preference information in a local database instead of within the cookie itself?

No overwhelming reason. I just felt like, in the long run, if I were to make dramatic changes to the inner workings of my channel, it would be a whole lot easier to make sweeping changes to a database than to deal with a lot of obsolete cookies. The drawback is that I am making my server do more work in maintaining a local database. If I am not careful, my server might be too busy doing database work to serve pages efficiently.