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Comment by Someone1234 | Hacker News Reader

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).

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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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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