Their genre categorizations are a joke too.
Really, the only thing that their search (at least on the Roku) seems to work for is Titles. Would it be too much to ask to be able to search against director, cast, language, actors, date?
They see engagement as a proxy for stickiness, and similarly lack of engagement as a leading indicator of churn.
So they implement features that look like they increase engagement, like auto-play while scrolling, auto-play of next title, auto-play of a new series after the end of a series. I don't know about other people, but they absolutely infuriate me.
We normally mute Netflix on entry into the app because we know that it's going to start blaring out of the speakers as the menu is navigated. And even the menu can't be navigated in peace: I need to keep hopping between adjacent shows to stop it trying to auto-play in the background with distracting images. If I want to leave the remote idle, I need to exit the app or find somewhere for focus to rest where it's not going to start playing something.
It's just one or two more "engagement" steps away from getting cancelled.
The only one I'm cool with is auto-play of the next episode after I finish one, and even then it's iffy. Seriously though Netflix, I'm reading the movies description, why would I also want to see the studio logos and listening to the opening music? I can't even stop it as I'm not actually watching the movie.
I actually loathe this. I like endings. After the episode wraps up and the credits finish scrolling, I want everything to naturally stop so I have a few seconds to sit and process and contemplate.
You can technically turn off autoplay next episode, but the video will still go into a tiny window as soon as the credits start rolling, with a big ad encouraging you to watch the next episode. That's not how I want to consume content.
The Wii U Netflix app didn't support autoplay for the longest time, but then they finally updated it, and I can't downgrade.
Even if you've turned off play next episode, it will still auto-play the first episode in a different series after you've finished the last episode in a series.
The reason seems obvious to me. They want to mask their lack of content. It always seems that Netflix is trying to discourage search. I guess that's because there's a good chance whatever movie/tv show you're trying to search for won't be available. Netflix only has 35 movies out of IMDb Top 250 [1]. Pretty sure the number is even less for other countries.
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/9gksft/netflix_only...
If looking for something to connect to a TV, I recommend a roku. They are the Switzerland of streaming, wife/kid friendly UI, and don't compete. The rest of the streaming world is pretty conflicted. Sony/Microsoft, Apple vs world, Netflix vs world, etc. Not only are there more channels for roku than anything else I've seen, the implementation of the client seems noticeably better. In particular the netflix UI on various other platforms like various smart TVs is pretty terrible.
They seem to have elevated the prominence of the "continue watching" so that it's in the top three bars shown, but even that fact is ridiculous -- the obvious order should be "continue watching", "watchlist", and then start in with the recommendations. I have no idea why they make it so hard for me to watch things that I've declared an intention to watch. Why even have a watchlist in that case? Is it just a holdover from a previous design that they are no longer really interested in supporting?