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Comment by bpicolo | Hacker News Reader

I'm mostly sad that Netflix detects nothing and pauses my show anyway after a couple episodes. : (

That really only became possible when they decided to auto-play new episodes, which is a bad feature in general. There are quite a few shows with really nice music videos in their ending credits. Shrinking the video to the size of a postage stamp and kicking me into a new episode is a rather annoying.

They also have a terrible habit of skipping the opening credits. The credits are often funny or beautiful. Every time I watch Futurama, I need to start the show and then rewind back to the beginning to see the opening joke. It's like VHS all over again.

Opps. I'm ranting. You know, I never noticed how much the interface annoyed me until I stopped to think about it.

Auto-whatever interfaces in general need to hit an incredibly high "success" rate in terms of doing what the user wants to avoid feeling frustrating. I don't remember the study, but the number was in the high 90s, percent wise.

Yes, this. I turned off the auto-play-next feature but there is no way to avoid the shrink-credits thing. :-/

I never noticed it skipping the opening credits though.

It definitely skips the opening credits on the shows my kids watch (Octonauts, Cat in the Hat, etc.). For better or worse, both of these also have another song in the episode near the beginning (the same song, every episode).

This is on a Roku 3, not sure if it's a different experience for other devices.

It depends on the show. I think they only ever skip opening credits right at the start of the video, but most shows tend to have a scene before them, so it rarely applies.

They also use the mechanism to skip "previously on" sections, which is probably a good idea during a marathon, since they're usually more spoiler than reminder in that situation.

A long time ago I saw someone post that support was able to turn off this feature on the account. No idea if that is true.

>Yes, this. I turned off the auto-play-next feature but there is no way to avoid the shrink-credits thing. :-/

If in Chrome, try the 'hide postplay' feature of the Flix Plus by Lifehacker extension.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/flix-plus-by-lifeh...

Different strokes for different folks - I like watching the opening credits for the 1st episode, but not the 3rd.

exactly this

That's often true for me too. There's just certain shows for which that's not the case, and I really remember fighting against the interface.

Futurama and the Simpsons are really the main shows this applies to, as in both the opening credits have been made to be a feature of the episode.

Simpsons have of course taken it far more extreme than Futurama, by making the sofa gag into an at time extremely elaborate part of the show.

I totally will re-listen to Mad Men's jazzy intro music every time...

It's "A Beautiful Mine" by RJD2, incidentally.

You can turn it off.

What interests me is how inconsistent it is.

For example, I can go a whole afternoon some days without it auto-pausing, while others as you said, you can go two episodes and it will pause on you.

I suspect Netflix tracks window focus via JavaScript at minimal, and maybe other metrics too to try and guesstimate user idle-ness.

Interestingly when I am in a full screen game (and Netflix on another screen) it "never" pauses. It only pauses when I am not doing anything on the machine and just watching (i.e. I effectively get punished for paying too much attention).

The auto-pausing also happens if you are using Chromecast, so they must have more than one approach.

It happens on Apple TV (previous generation) as well, but it seems to be consistent and it will do it after about 2 hours.

It has been way less than 2 hours on Chromecast, but that isn't a scientific test. My anecdata is that they seem to do it when you least want them too, yet keep playing episode after episode when you turn things off and Netflix didn't get paused for whatever reason (see this on Roku as well which doesn't seem to detect that the HDMI receiver is switched to standby/off).

It stops on my xbox after a couple of episodes whether or not I turn the TV off

The same thing happens on the Sony Blu-Ray player I watch Netflix through (via "apps" or whatever). Usually after more than 3 episodes maybe, with no interaction from the remote.

My theory (based on 0 facts) is that they will ask you if you're still streaming on shows that experience a high load and want to save the servers streaming that particular episode.

As someone who works for a CDN who does streaming, I don't think this is the case. Popular videos would be streamed from multiple servers, and it is actually easier to stream the same video to lots of users vs a lot of videos to only a few users each.

Perhaps they don't want Netflix to be used for public screens (laundry, hairdresser) and randomization is necessary to check for the presence of a human.

But you can automate that away.

they might have a "binge-ness" score for every show. If they know people usually don't binge more than three episodes of Scandal then they can safely assume that the TV has been left on when the fourth episode kicks in.

They may even construct segmented binge patterns where they know episodes 3 to 6 of House Of Cards usually gets binged where as episodes 1 and 2 usually do not.

Building and training these segments would appear random to the end user but after awhile should be good at guessing when the TV has been left on or the user is binge watching.

I've noticed that they seem to start prompting more and more rapidly. If I'm binging on a new show, I can start Saturday morning and not get prompted until shortly after noon, say, but then I'll get prompted at 1:30 and then 2:30 and then after the next episode (numbers made up, but you get the idea).

This is really annoying, and the opposite of the sort of smart adaptive behaviour I'd like to see. It'd be great if Netflix could detect, 'this guy seems to have regular work hours (because he normally watches Netflix at a regular time), and appears to be binge-watching a TV show; let's not bother him.'

But then, the Netflix app is still terribly primitive compared to their website, so…maybe I'm asking for too much.

I might be making this all up, I'll need to actually test it out now. I swear when watching Netflix on a computer, you start an episode and your cursor is auto-hidden. At some point, maybe even when the second episode starts, I swear the cursor becomes visible again on the screen. I then instinctively giggle my finger on my touchpad to make it hide again. After watching couple episodes in a row and doing that, if I don't I feel like it pauses and ask if I'm still there within 20 or so seconds.

Has anyone else noticed that? My theory is that they reveal the cursor after every new episode to try to get you to move it and hide it. If you do that each time, they could assume you're not paying as much attention.

You know, I was actually the same way and instantly started searching for ways to disable it to no avail (aside from a simple setTimeout grease monkey script). After I've had it for awhile, I've come to actually enjoy it because a lot of times I've been on the verge of passing out while watching TV, wishing I could turn it off without moving and breaking out of my close-to-falling-asleep state.

<rant>That pisses me off to no end. What's even worse is that now some of their movies start playing as soon as you select them from the main screen. I'm still reading the description, trying to understand if I want to watch it, and while I'm reading, it fades out and starts playing anyway. Of all the dumb things they could do</rant>

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