Comment by darkpuma | Hacker News Reader

Comment by darkpuma | Hacker News Reader

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Let me preface this by admitting that I'm a very poor judge of video quality since I generally think those 720p/700MB torrent encodes are swell. So I'm going to ignore the matter of video quality; by my awful standards they're both perfectly adequate.

I think Amazon has Netflix beat on UX. To search Netflix without using third party tools is a real nightmare. The user interface seems user-hostile, like it's designed to conceal from the user the true breadth of Netflix's library (I earnestly believe it was.) It wasn't always this bad, in the early days of netflix's streaming business the search wasn't bad, and back when they were a DVD service (which is when I first subscribed) the search functionality was pretty decent even.

But with Amazon video, you've got the search features built into the amazon prime apps, which admittedly usually sucks, but you've also got the option of searching on amazon.com itself, or on IMDB (which has been owned by Amazon since the late 90s.) Searching on IMDB is what I do. When doing advanced searches you can specify that you're only interested in movies that are free on amazon prime in your region.

E.g.: Feature Action movies that are free on Amazon Prime in the US, and are in the IMDB Top 1000: https://www.imdb.com/search/title/?title_type=feature&genres...

(Perhaps IMDB advanced search for prime videos is bad UX for casual users (although it was my non-technical mother who brought my attention to it, so I'd push back against that notion) but at the very least it's an option. While I've seen third party websites offering a good proper advanced search of Netflix's catalogue, as far as I know if you stick to Netflix operated search interfaces you're basically stuck up shit creek.)

GP here. I do agree with some of your points. I usually watch content on a TV, and very rarely on a computer or mobile device. On the TV, it's nice to have IMDB ratings that show up on some/many (not all) of the content on Amazon Prime Video. With Netflix I have to look it up separately. Maybe Netflix doesn't like IMDB because that's owned by Amazon, but it could provide Rotten Tomatoes ratings instead, and I'd be happy.

When I do watch things on the TV from a distance, it's important for the content preview images to be large enough and the spacing between rows of content preview images appropriate (fonts and font sizes also matter). On both Amazon Prime Video and Hotstar, I find the preview images and the layout to be cluttered and much smaller than expected. Reading content titles is quite difficult. It gets worse because both Amazon Prime Video and Hotstar have a lot more Indian content, but they tend to display the title transliterated in English while the poster has the title in the original language (which is small). This makes it difficult to read the text in the Indian language's script (transliterated titles can only help to some extent).

Amazon Prime Video and Hotstar also seem to load information on opened shows/movies slower compared to Netflix. I have a fast connection (40Mbps) with almost nothing else going on most of the time. So Netflix is doing something better in these areas.

Of course, like others have mentioned, I hate the Netflix auto-playing trailers for the currently selected show or movie. That's certainly very annoying and a ding on the Netflix UX.

My biggest complaint about Prime video is the absolutely horrid navigation of TV series.

If I'm browsing a particular genre, say Sci-Fi for example, I'm shown every season of each show, with it's own cover art. This serves to make their selection of shows seem more expansive than it is, which might be the purpose.

And given that they have a fair number of long running series licensed, this means browsing through dozens of the same shows.

I'll qualify all this by saying my experience is limited to the Fire TV interface, as I rarely watch streaming on my PC, but if the interface is that tedious on their own branded experience, I can't imagine the web interface is much better, though I could be way off the mark.

>those 720p/700MB torrent encodes

Are those still produced for recent movies?

Sometimes, but it's becoming less and less common.

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