Netflix and Amazon are terrible. Want to continue what you were watching? Gonna have to find where we hid that this time, g’luck!
It's a follow up to an earlier article where he lays out the table stakes for streaming apps, both worth reading.
So a bunch of people in their spare time seem to be doing a better job than Netflix, why is that? Because I don't think Netflix is trying to achieve the same goal
They are trying to push content Netflix wants you to watch. Not content that you want to watch.
Do most users want to be told what to consume?
Circumstantially I'd guess so, because otherwise it's a lot of effort to add friction for no reason.
But I don't know.
Possibly Spotify and Netflix do. Or possibly not. Perhaps they're just dysfunctional?
As a sibling commenter says, these issues are not an "expert mode" problem, you can see regular people facing them too. But they usually give up and eventually comply, watching something else. The frustration is still there, but we bitch about it and try something else, while a bunch of people just go watch Trending Show #229.
(I realize it might sound harsh/pretentious/"sheeple", but it genuinely happened to me last month. I wanted to watch Truman Show with my nephew at my sister's house, and it was a genuine clown show to try to find a service that would play it. Netflix didn't have it, their ISP's service didn't have it, it was available on Apple TV but we couldn't get the device to work because it required an update and we didn't have a computer at hand to be able to pair it or whatever, I was there so we even tried casting from a piracy app in my phone, but their Smart TV only accepted some weird proprietary method that was not available on my phone, so we ended up watching El Camino, a terribly mediocre Breaking Bad spinoff, my nephew was bored halfway through and went to play Fortnite instead)
I like "lean-back listening" and that's the whole reason I'm still sticking with Spotify. They (almost) always have something to accompany my mood both out of songs I already like and new ones I often also like (yay!). The drift in mood is minimal. I can listen to calm piano music for a whole night while Apple music can shift over to loud metal within only a few songs (what a joke).
It may be getting worse, though. Especially a few songs keep playing over and over, sometimes despite me explicitly blocking them. Both a lot of new or familiar songs often show up at times at which I want just the other - and of course you can't choose (what a joke! The algorithm is great, just badly tuned, let me change it!).
For me is that I just refuse to pay because I know they can just do a regular interface but they want to trick you into some stuff with their UI.
I just don't feel in the mood of paying for being treated as laboratory mice.
> If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate’s service is more valuable.
Nowadays I exclusively pirate movies and shows, because just the thought of having to spend 30 minutes to figure out where some movie is, then trying to navigate the respective service's interface, just to be presented with a not-empty-but-actually-doesnt-show-what-i-was-searching-for-because-stats-said-people-might-watch-more-if-you-mislead-them-in-search-results-pages because it is not available on my region, and then trying to figure out what combination of VPN and region incantations won't block me behind a million captchas, is too much work to be bothered with.
Instead, I just open Stremio, put in the movie or show name, and even if it is some obscure Javanese arthouse film from the '20s (I don't know if such a thing exists, but you get the point) it will find it. Sure, finding a source with good availability is sometimes not the first-click experience, but it's still at least 10 times faster than all the above. And I can put on screen sharing to watch it with my friends without DRM blacking out the screen.
Worst of all, the pricing structures of streaming apps are very opaque, so if I were to do the still-illegal-but-morally-correct thing of paying for the official product and pirating anyways, I don't think any of my subscription fee would actually go to the company that made that film.
I wish we had a functioning rental model still. Go to some storefront, pay a small amount of money to get any publisher's title, get a video file to play "at home" (in your preferred video player), pinky swear you didn't rip it, done. The closest you get is the Youtube rental thingy, but at least over here it is incredibly overpriced, costs more than a cinema ticket. Or buying physical media, but then you have to pay the physical distribution costs, keep around shiny plastic donuts and specialized machinery.
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And besides, I'm still not sold on algorithmic recommendations, and watch things mostly based on meatspace recommendations.
Subscription services have one simple goal: provide just enough value to keep one from cancelling their subscription. There is no real incentive to do better if all the competitors have the same goal and behaviour, which is the current situation. So they raise the prices a little bit, skip on user-motivated UX, and double down on mediocre "just good enough to idly waste time on" content, and slowly bring down the user expectations about content and how to find it, placing them in a "learned helplessness" state of not being arsed to find what they like themselves.
There were also multiple claims of them doing cryptomining on your device.
It looks like I was too late and it had left their catalogue again, but anything I found on the internet was either "look at this nice show available on Netflix" (posted 2 years ago) or, very very rarely, a Netflix page with a grayed out play button. Again, no explanation.
It was the first time in a long while I had opened it and also the last.
Salient examples are the alternative Twitter interfaces that proliferated, and indeed those for Hacker News. One huge benefit is that users won't be stuck with a single, often hostile UI, but be free to either interpret data client-side, or make use of a possible open market in presentation layer websites which may add their own value.
Infrastructure/service providers cannot be allowed to continue to control the interfaces that are used to access their services.