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Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

Do people not binge watch movies on Netflix because of something inherent in the form, or because Netflix doesn't make continuous play of related sets of movjrs, especially serial franchises (where it would make sense just as it does for TV series) possible, both because it doesn't support it as the default (or even an optional) mode in the UI as it does for TV series and because it also rarely has whole franchises in its library to support it even manually?

I suspect it's as much the latter as the former.

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It's definitely more in the first category, and the psychology behind watching shows vs movies:

1) We live in a multitasking world where people are half watching netflix and half on their phone. TV plots typically develop in smaller chunks, requiring less attention.

2) Most people do not set out to binge watch multiple hours of netflix, but instead get caught up in the shows. Movies feel like a larger commitment, even though many times people watch for the same total length of time.

3) Binge watching often happens because the TV show model is to often end on a cliff hanger.

I really wish Netflix had the YouTube-esque ability for users to make and share playlists.

All the Star Trek series and films are on Netflix. Wouldn't it be great to have a playlist of every episode by original air date? (So you don't get confused when Deep Space 9 refers to an event in First Contact?) Wouldn't it be awesome to have a playlist of only the top 20 Voyager episodes, so you don't have to suffer through the awful ones?

It surprises me they haven't implemented this. If they did, any user could solve your problem of putting a movie series in order.

Of course I also wish they had a "back 30 seconds" button for when you miss a line of dialog, and that's never been done either. Sigh. It seems like all their revenue is going into making Marvel shows and zero into software development.

I think their UI is purposefully bad to make it hard to notice titles coming in and out of circulation, as the deals they have with different production companies expire.

Their UI (which I worked on heavily) is actually VERY optimized and an immense amount of testing around success metrics goes into it.

It has far less to do with "not noticing" and much more to do with the algorithms knowing what you might want to watch that you didn't already know you wanted to watch.

Serialized fiction has a fundamentally different structure from feature films. Even in film series, you don't typically have the sort of multi-layered narrative with cliffhangers that keeps people going from one to the next. Star Wars ends with the good guys winning and the death star blowing up. There's no reason to straight to Empire Strikes Back.

There aren't that many film series or sets where you can easily jump in and out of attentiveness, like you can with a TV show once you're familiar with the characters. I do remember having the James Bond marathons on TV all day, but anything less formulaic means having to make a substantial investment of attention when starting a new "chunk".

I suspect there’s a question of causality. Do people get netflix so they can binge-watch, or do they binge-watch because it’s the only thing netflix does well?

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