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Comment by autoexec | Hacker News Reader

I agree, netflix might be too embarrassed by their catalogue to show people a simple A-Z listing of everything they have, but I'd absolutely watch netflix more often if they did. Scrolling through the same shows I'm not interested in over and over across their multiple random/useless categories takes up way too much time.

Every so often I'll go to search and enter random 2-3 letter combinations because I usually find a bunch of stuff I'd like to see but Netflix has been hiding from me.

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I have to wonder how much of this is to favor cache hits for streams over picking the bytes up out of storage. That is, if a bunch of people are streaming a show, it's easier to add a few more and reuse the edge cache. Most viewers won't go beyond the recommendations, so the back-catalog pulls are less frequent, and less pressure on the infrastructure.

Total speculation, though.

> how much of this is to favor cache hits for streams over picking the bytes up out of storage.

Netflix's catalog historically has been small enough that it can fit within a single rack.

With 8Mbps [0] bitrates for 4k (okay, add 50% for transcoding to lower resolutions, so let's call it 12Mbps), we get about 5.4GB per hour of video. At 360TB for a single 2U Open Connect storage device [1], that translates to 67k hours of 4k video.

This article from 2020 [2] indicated that US Netflix's catalog was about 36k hours. Even at 50% growth since then it would still comfortably fit on a single machine.

[0] "The highest 4K bitrate on average is 8 Mbps which is also a 50% reduction compared to 16 Mbps of the fixed-bitrate ladder." https://netflixtechblog.com/optimized-shot-based-encodes-for...

[1] https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/appliances/#the-hardware

[2] https://www.whats-on-netflix.com/news/how-long-would-it-take...

They already have simple A-Z listings.

All TV shows A-Z: https://www.netflix.com/browse/genre/83?so=az

All movies A-Z: https://www.netflix.com/browse/genre/34399?so=az

You can find it in the web UI by clicking a TV or movie page, and then choosing Sort A-Z. The reason it's so buried is that it's pretty useless. Most people don't want to scroll through a hundred mostly bad shows starting with punctuation symbols and numbers.

Agree with you that it would be lovely if Netflix had more fine-grained controls.

Doesn't seem to work if you aren't logged in, but I'll give it a try once I'm in my account. Thanks!

The UI/UX is the crux of the problem for me, and infact, the same problem with Amazon Prime.

They both have fantastic shows and films, I know because i've seen some of them, but they NEVER seem to show up in app. Instead, I get endless scrolling of the same shows I skip over every time.

The algo doesn't seem to learn (Not to say it doesn't but the perception). The UI doesn't have enough unique elements to drive the algo. What I mean is if I tend to watch 20min comedy shows between 9-11pm. Create me some blocks of shows that meet this criteria. So a rewatch, continue and a new show.

They need to allow the customer to feed in more data. Integrate IMDB, Trakt etc and farm this data to improve recommendations, even if they are shows/films outside of their catalogue. I have a feeling that the lack of "I've seen this before outside of Netflix" button and the simple thumbs up or down doesn't provide the depth in the data.

I get why they moved to the current rating system, the thread on here discussing it at the time was actually really insightful for someone who was learning algos at the time.

We subscribe to Netflix, Disney, Binge, Prime and previously Stan. They all have annoyingly poor interfaces in one way or another. It's quite amazing that not one of them has excelled at allowing you to find something you might want to watch.

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