The Power Of A Picture | Hacker News Reader

The Power Of A Picture

media.netflix.com

19 pointsVagantem12 comments

I have just enough experience with marketing to be able to avoid images that are shit. All their loser images are shit. The author of the article is on the right path, faces full of emotions and cultural relatability is important. The best teasers (and snapshots are just the most minimalist teasers) make a promise to (1) tell a story that is (2) relevant to me and (3) fits my mood.

The problem with video snapshots is that everybody is so freaking good. We're spoiled by every random tube site doing image recognition and automatically A/B testing frames from videos and serving the most popular. Big budgets are spent on promoting movies and TV. So a lay analysis like this cannot possibly begin to scratch the surface.

I'm confused as to why Netflix would need to A/B test their thumbnails. If people are browsing thumbnails, I think they would already be paying subscribers. Is there a business reason for doing this?

Help customers find content they like and keep them around. If you run out of content, why wouldn't you cancel your subscription?

If you use their service more it is less likely that you will cancel it.

Nice! A/B testing carried to its logical conclusion. I would not have thought of dynamically rating thumbnail images, but once I read the article, it was 'of course' they would do that.

Netflix: 2016 and we still don't let you sort by rating or filter out media you've already seen.

Sorting by rating can be subjective, but it is odd that it doesn't hide things you've already seen.

There's even a 'Watch it again' category that is populated by things that you watched and rated highly.

There's nothing subjective about withholding the ability to sort/filter by ratings.

And it's obvious that users should be able to mark content as "watched" even if you didn't watch it on Netflix.

I generally like Netflix, but when I'm wading through 100s of movies and television programs that I've already seen, or that have 1 or 2 stars, my loyalty to Netflix is greatly diminished.

Meanwhile, they waste time and money on algorithmic recommendations that are, in my experience, almost completely useless. (And I've bothered to rate a lot of content in the hope of improving their recommendations, too.)

I want to turn on Netflix (or an alternative), hide all the watched content, hide everything below three stars, sort by highest-to-lowest rating. It's not difficult.

Don't get me started on Netflix's UX problems.. that video player?? I've seen cloned illegal streaming sites with better players. Requiring Silverlight to run? They put up so many barriers to entry it's a surprise they ever got a market.

Netflix has a HTML5 player now, afaik. Works alright on Safari. Agreed RE streaming sites though!

So the "don't judge a book by it's cover" doesn't reach enough people these days.

Did it ever?

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