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Comment by bhaak | Hacker News Reader

> I've tried browsing for others but hate browsing on Netflix.

Is this Netflix or do you hate browsing on other streaming services as well?

Regarding UI IMO Netflix is still top. Disney+ is somewhat close in handling but noticeably slower and you notice its focus on movies. Series are not as easily navigatable as on Netflix.

Amazon Prime is abysmal. They don't even group different seasons of a series together. Here in Switzerland, it's even worse, I get a mix of French and German stuff recommended.

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I don't understand how anyone can say the netflix UI is anything other than trash.

Part of people's problem with netflix is that it shows them maybe 100 different shows out of the couple thousand they have at any given time, for the rest you basically have to use a 3rd party to discover them. Sure its prettier than it was back when they put everything in a giant tree/list, but now its a dozen or so vertical categories with 20 or so horizontal items and it doesn't even bother to deduplicate shows out of multiple similar rows.

The best netflixy way for me to discover new shows is to log into my wife's profile where she has a 100 different romance/etc movies. Otherwise "whats-on-netflix.com" for example does a better job than netflix itself, including showing a complete list of new additions, and removals, etc.

I don't understand how anyone can say the netflix UI is anything other than trash.

Perhaps because the UI varies from device to device.

When I first had the thought that the UI was trash, it occurred to me that the point of the UI is to drive the user's behavior and not the other way around. I think there's an "In Soviet Russia..." joke around here somewhere.

Yeah it's more of a garbage-in garbage-out status nowadays regardless of device.

Huh? It’s pretty obvious Netflix uses the same UI across all of its platforms. It might be condensed slightly on smaller screens, but it’s the exact same interface.

Can’t agree more, the difference in watching Netflix on Xbox one and Apple TV is noticeable (also the fact that there isn’t integration with the Apple TV app is the solo reason I’m most likely to finish my tv show from Amazon prime compared to Netflix (because let’s face it it’s not Netflix and chill anymore now we have to check more than a sub. app to find what to watch

If I know what I want to watch, the Netflix UI is perfect. Every other service's UI makes it surprisingly difficult to find and watch the next episode of "thing I've been watching every night for the past few weeks". Also the other services make it harder to pause/resume/fast-forward, let alone achieve "advanced" things like toggling subtitles.

That is true. As crap as Netflix has become, while you are watching a show, the experience is great.

Netflix is faster, reliable, and works every time, even on slow and unreliable WIFI. I can fast forward, go back, pause, and resume without delay. Netflix is simple, it works, and I don't need more than that. It could certainly be better, but it's not any worse than other streaming services. Netflix is by far the better user experience of all services I use.

I also do not like browsing for content on Netflix because whenever I pause on a title it starts playing trailer with sound when what I really want to do is look at the average user rating and read the premise blurb.

That is so bad; I always mute my TV when browsing Netflix

you can turn that off in the settings.

Where is that in the settings?

If you open Netflix in browser, go to account settings, then select specific profiles dropdown, there are playback settings at the end. You can disable automatic playback during browsing. Its really useful with kids.

https://help.netflix.com/en/node/2102

I'm partial on that. I sometimes want the trailer and sometimes don't want it.

But with the mute button this is easy mitigated. The mute button is one of the most used buttons on my remote anyway.

The Netflix decision that is causing me the most aggravation is that they are the only service I use that doesn't integrate with the watch next bar on Apple TV. I forget that I'm watching something, especially if they are doing weekly episode drops, and then lose interest if I've forgotten what's going on. Everybody else is able to add their new episode to that bar so I can work through my backlog, and even pop new seasons in there if I've watched the show in the past.

It feels like they're making decisions to suit themselves rather than me and it winds me up considering they are the more expensive subscription.

+1 Netflix not integrating with Apple TV is a pain for me also - for everything else, I often search on Apple TV.

That's huge pain. I love my Apple TV and I'm much more likely to cancel netflix than not use the ATV. I also really love the TV app and Watch next, for apps that work with it it's such a great UI IMO.

I like up next/ watch now on Apple TV

However it is irritating that shows I’ve purchased from the iTunes Store occasionally lose their blessed status§ and I can neither put them in up next nor even have the show’s page open to the episode I last watched. Unless I binge the whole show in one sitting I’m gonna be scrolling horizontally past a lot of episodes every time I sit down to watch.

§ my hypothesis is that it is when the package I bought them in gets taken off iTunes (e.g. I got the complete Downton Abbey, but for a few weeks they were doing a every episode and the movie package and you couldn’t buy just all the seasons together, that one even lost its blessed status while I was watching the show, which was a mystifying experience)

> Amazon Prime is abysmal. They don't even group different seasons of a series together. Here in Switzerland, it's even worse, I get a mix of French and German stuff recommended.

I haven't noticed this in France. For a given series, there's a "season" dropdown that has all the seasons, even some which may be unavailable.

However, I hate dubbed movies and series, and I hate that I can't filter out those titles that, for some reason, only offer a French dubbed version.

Yeah in Spain too.."the user is in Spain so will want Spanish dubbing". Uhhh.

The dubbing is also horribly done with bored voices that don't match the actors at all. Yet native language (+ subs if native is not English) is often unavailable. Especially on prime

HBO Max buffers content and fails to play all the time for me (on Samsung Smart TV), which almost never happens with Netflix.

I love a lot of HBO Max content (especially Turner Classic Movies) but the app is experience is painful.

Yea HBO's app is incredibly broken. I don't understand how the rewind button is still broken. At least 20% of the time when I rewind the app crashes, how is that even possible in 2022? Seems like they're doing it on purpose to try to get you to pay attention.

The state of media Apps in General is REALLY low. Paramount+ makes me turn on subtitles for EVERY episode and ignores the system settings, HBO Max's app is a dumpster fire, Netflix doesn't integrate with Apple TV or the algo driven listings are terrible, Hulu is a broken mess all around. In fact the only media app I enjoy using is Apple TV+/TV.app.

Amazon prime UI and search is kinda shit, but if I found an interesting show to watch (to be honest I’m using tiktok as my recommandation engine) I search for it then continue watching from the Apple TV app

Not the OP, but I hate browsing on most/all the platforms. But Netflix seems to be worse than average and that's an already low bar.

Things that rustle me... - recommending movies/shows I've already watched. There are very few shows I want to rewatch. - recommending trash reality shows. I rarely watch them. - recommending too many shows that are in a foreign language. I will watch foreign shows, but most of my viewing it's just background noise while I workout or something else where I can't easily watch subtitles. - Auto-playing trailers. It's annoying and loud.

> Here in Switzerland, it's even worse, I get a mix of French and German stuff recommended.

Isn’t that right for Switzerland? What’s the issue?

That's how Americans view Europe, yes. "The user lives in Switzerland so they speak both" :) in reality there's German-speaking Swiss and French-speaking ones. In fact there's even Italian-speaking ones but they don't usually make the cut for services like this. The division is pretty much divided by region and heritage. They will technically speak both but will not prefer to. Also besides the languages there's also a cultural difference. And Swiss-German is quite different from German/Austrian German too but let's not get into that.

Just bunching all the content "because your country is .ch so you will like all of this stuff" is such a typical American oversimplification.

> They will technically speak both but will not prefer to.

Well, there are places in Switzerland like Bern that are officially and pragmatically bilingual.

Yes but many are not. And more importantly: many of its inhabitants are not.

It's this American view that the whole world is 'like America with just a different locale setting' I find really annoying.

In the UK we have many Asian shows on Netflix. We watch them on captions. It's not has hard as you'd imagine. Give it a go!

Imagine half of them would be all Asian and not just the big bucks international focused ones like Squid Game. But local ones not tailored for it. You'll tune out soon. It's like going for a regular cinema but getting an arthouse collection.

I travel a lot (at least before Corona) and sometimes Netflix would not even allow me to continue watching a movie in the hotel, in the same subtitle language as I watched it before. Because I connected from an IP in Romania I'm suddenly supposed to speak their language too :S Because the options for captions in other languages disappear. This really annoyed me as I often would pop up in different countries and using a VPN was too slow on crappy hotel WiFi.

It's this kind of shortsighted vision that I argue against. The world is not that simple. Maybe in the US it is but not everywhere.

Region locked content is usually enforced by the provider of the content, not the distributer. So don't blame Netflix, blame the studio who licensed the content. I'm sure Netflix would prefer to work with blanket international licenses rather that have to negotiate different terms for different content in each individual country.

> It's this American view that the whole world is 'like America with just a different locale setting' I find really annoying.

Sure, at the local movie theater we have Indian films (probably multiple regions), Korean films, Chinese ones, sometimes Spanish and so on. English is hardly the only language around. My wife (Chinese) consumes a lot of Korean dramas on Netflix.

My feeling about Switzerland when living there is that it was slightly less multi-cultural than the states, having a much stronger desire for immigrants to assimilate and become "suisse" (but disclaimer, I was living on the French side). You can still find the multi-cultural stuff, but version originale is the exception, not the rule.

So they can pick and chose what they want based on their preference can't they?

What's the huge issue? Is preferring German and being presented French some kind of slight?

It is a bit yes. I've not been to Switzerland but I know that in Belgium this is totally not done. Flemish speakers often despise French culture and vice versa. And have their own TV channels, shows, media personalities etc. I'm Dutch myself and am often viewed as Flemish by the French speakers when I try to speak French, and I can feel the hate (it's quite uncomfortable so I don't usually go to their parts).

Also, Netflix already shows so little in their overview, making half of them non-starters is really annoying. The world is not a cookie cutter duplicate of America with just some different language settings. There should be an option for local differences (not just this one but ones that exist in many countries). It's just a total disregard of national and regional cultural differences too.

In fact I'm quite surprised the US has such a harmonised culture because they have huge differences too. I just can't wrap my head around how a Silicon Valley hipster can be just as offended by half a boob on TV than a methodist Midwestern. Though only for the latter it's an actual cultural and religious issue. The level of cultural harmonisation despite all the regional differences is something that's pretty unique in the US I believe. I've travelled a lot and I've not seen this in other countries.

> It's just a total disregard of national and regional cultural differences too.

That surprises me - Netflix seem pretty good at accommodating UK culture as a contrast. Local shows like The Crown, for example.

Some local productions yes. They do that in every EU country too because it's in fact an EU requirement to do so. But the UK is culturally much more similar to America than the rest of Europe.

For us there should just be a preferred language setting instead of just dumping the user in a certain box because of the IP they connect from.

Huh—I never saw Netflix' British content as accommodating UK culture, but as accommodating American Anglophilia. Same reason they have a ton of Japanese content.

Maybe it's both, I suppose.

Deducing language preferences by the country TLD is just plain wrong. Especially in a country where about 25% of the population is from abroad.

My knowledge of French is basically non existent so showing stuff that is only available in French is completely useless to me. Even worse, it's confusing as I am not sure if there even is a German version on the site or not.

The strange thing is my profile is set to German. A better experience would be if I could set my preferred languages. If you would get fancy, add sub title options to the mix.

> If you would get fancy, add sub title options to the mix.

Not sure if you're aware there are already subtitle options?

I think people are here confused why they get offered films in other languages as if it's a bug? It's not - in the UK for example almost everyone only speaks English but we still have a lot of Asian films and series in our catalogue - people just happily watch them with subtitles.

Some of the most popular shows in the UK Netflix are not in English, such as Squid Game.

> Not sure if you're aware there are already subtitle options?

I mean subtitle options in the settings for preferred languages.

For example if I set my preferred languages to only German I would get movies and films offered that have German subtitles but no German audio. At least on Netflix, not even a search will find you stuff that is English audio only unless you change the profile language to English even if they have German subtitles.

I had an odd experience when watching season 10 of Modern Family. After the final episode of that season, it started playing the first episode of season 11 but it played in English as the German dub was not ready yet. But there was no way to get that episode by the normal UI means, only when switching languages it would show up.

Prime is better than Netflix on desktop. They worked hard to get there, but they finally ruined the website enough that both my Android TVs Netflix app and prime are better. It took me a while to even figure out how to show some minimal information about a show that was more than name and thumb.

Not OP, but Netfix UI is uniquely bad. It looks good ... and make it impossible to find shows you might like and be at mood for ... despite them actually being there.

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