There are still days I can't find anything I want to watch on Netflix but it seems way better than the DVD/Blueray situation we had here.
It's important to keep in mind that there are some Dark Patterns in Netflix to try to fool you into thinking there is more back inventory than there really is. And now they've started flipping the cover art even in My List every time you wrap around. If it happened once in a while I'd think they were A/B testing on different cover art to see what happens, but the fact it happens in your List and every time you navigate is pretty damned sketchy.
Also as someone else complained, their UI has sucked sucked sucked for a while now. I think the only reason people don't complain is that Hulu has somehow created one that's substantially worse. Honestly the whole management chain for the UI team at Hulu should be fired. How that abomination survived so many approvals is shocking.
Would you be willing to elaborate on what you find frustrating? We're doing work in a similar area.
Which categories you get are random, yes you can search for specific tags but that's a bit of a hassle and involves typing on a remote. What I'd really like would be both custom and sticky categories. Categories that will always be shown to me (simply by liking a category), and sticky custom categories by combining tags (like creating a action comedy category by combining the action and comedy tags and having that category always show up on my feed).
Netflix lacks personalization IMHO, because algorithms will never replace my actual taste. Let me tell you what I want you to show me.
Also, they should make a drill down search (minimize typing, please!). What I mean is a simply search menu with 5-10 major category types (genre, actor, director, tags) then being able to continue filtering by different categories on the fly.
Also, add a completely optional where I can see what my friends liked (with their permission ofc). That way I can, hassle free, get recommendations from people I trust.
You can even make public feeds! Famous movie critic public feed, etc.
So many possibilities to improve Netflix, I wouldn't even know where to start.
To get out of a list you have to walk off the beginning. In both cases there’s now a very small limit to the number of things you want in the screen because you’ll have to walk back or go clear through to get out. It reinforces having a scarcity of entries or too many subsections.
They should go back to using the menu button to escape out of a subsection. Make the subsection four or five elements wide and continuous scroll. But they keep doubling down on their poor use of real estate. Adding things like auto playing previews that some of us hate.
Hulu used to work like this, which is why I have such venom. My tv had the old UI on it, so I stopped using the Apple TV version for a year or two. But when I got the new TV I was stuck with the awful, and they’ve done basically nothing since.
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/netflix-ratings-really-mean-1...
How? That's because they pretty much own all the content that is on cable. Titles are gradually disappearing from Netflix and appearing on Hulu.
Netflix was smart to start creating their own content early on, without it they would be dead right now.
Artwork Personalization at Netflix.. https://medium.com/netflix-techblog/artwork-personalization-...
Excerpt:
Another challenge is to understand the impact of changing artwork that we show a member for a title between sessions. Does changing artwork reduce recognizability of the title and make it difficult to visually locate the title again, for example if the member thought was interested before but had not yet watched it? Or, does changing the artwork itself lead the member to reconsider it due to an improved selection? Clearly, if we find better artwork to present to a member we should probably use it; but continuous changes can also confuse people.
If it’s a bug they need to fix it. If it’s on purpose they need to fix their brains.
This was exactly what Blockbuster was like in New York.
They focused on mainstream, mostly blockbuster movies (hence the name, maybe).
For a really good selection, you had to go to independent video rental stores, like Kim's Video in Manhattan, which had way, way, waaaay more movies available than any Blockbuster store I've ever been in could dream of. There were some other independent video rental stores scattered across NYC and Long Island with similarly good selections.
Also, Blockbuster movies were often cut or censored, so you had to go to an independent video rental store to find uncut films. I've heard some people dispute that Blockbuster ever carried such films, but I'm far from the only one who remembers this happening. Search around on the web, and you'll see others reporting the same thing.
I'm not sure why they chose to have that focus, but it was clearly a choice on their part, not something they were forced to to.
My guess is that they did what they thought was most profitable for them, because most of the customers they catered to just preferred to watch mainstream, very popular movies.
Good independent video stores had a different model of catering towards viewers with more discerning tastes, so had extensive selections of more obscure films.
> Good independent video stores had a different model of catering towards viewers with more discerning tastes, so had extensive selections of more obscure films.
Of course independents had to focus on the market underserved by Blockbuster, even if that was a less profitable segment.
I'm not sure how much that kind of demographic data and prediction/modeling was worth.
Even now, though I've rated hundreds of movies on Netflix, Netflix routinely recommends me movies that I absolutely hate. Their recommendations are far more often wrong than right.
Blockbuster didn't have individual customer's ratings of the movies they watched to go on, and the technology and predictive/modeling algorithms they had access to 20 or 30 years ago must have been far, far worse than Netflix has now.
But they weren't doing individual recommendations, they were trying to predict aggregate demand for titles at local stores; aggregate predictions of the type are a lot easier to get usefully correct that individualized predictions of subjective quality.