Partly this the fault of Apple. They championed the idea that UI is an artistic expression and therefore 'configurability' and 'customizability' is akin to heresy. This view has now infected many existing products.
Part of the reason why many companies jumped on this bandwagon is also because 'customizability' is hard(er) to build in, and certainly more expensive to maintain.
It's also harder to A-B test with so many variables. If tests aren't statistics significant, the value of user analytics and UX experimentation decreases from a "% lift" perspective. It's harder to know if a feature change or a user defined config had a causal relationship to some other metric.
It may be the A-B testing tail wagging the dog.
Those types of tests serve two very different purposes. UI is also unit testable.
Unit tests are more of a binary pass/fail. A-B tests are looking for cause-and-effect relationships by comparing some metric between a control group and a variant group.
"How to turn autoplay previews on or off"
https://help.netflix.com/en/node/2102
On mobile:
1. From the Netflix app home screen, tap the profile icon or More
2. Tap Manage Profiles
3. ...
I contacted Netflix support, and they basically said, "Sorry. That doesn't necessarily actually stop them. We can't share anything about whether we have plans to change that."
It has been like this for years. I don't know if it's a glitch with my account or if they are doing it on purpose. Neither possibility makes me a happy customer.
I suspect that the answer is ads. The Netflix app is an ad billboard on your phone and TV. Also, copyright and DRM.
Edit: I wonder if draconian copyright laws are ultimately to blame here. Nobody is allowed to provide such a service. This is getting a bit off topic though since this article is specifically about content aesthetics.
And quite possible the ads-driven version, but I’ve never looked at that.
As someone who doesn't like the podcast walled garden Spotify is trying to build (I prefer my podcast market with competitive open standards and choice of clients, thank you very much), the podcasts really bothered me. As a paying user, I should be able to turn them off entirely, but they kept overhauling the UI to make them more and more prominent. I stopped using Spotify a year ago today, and I've been very happy managing my own music library with Jellyfin since then.
That said, we are sort of there. Google can tell you where a show is streaming and I think Apple TV displays shows from different streaming services. Just not to the point anyone that wants to can build one.
Maybe someone is paying Netflix to suggest this movie (edit:content) to you ?
But maybe it can be that it is public knowledge and I'm one of the ten thousand who doesn't know? If so, do you have a link?
Nope, it was just a thought. Sorry if I came off as implying shaddy things. I agree with what you wrote and it would be surprising something like that had been going on for years without anyone noticing (or revealing it).
I suppose it'd be less expensive to advertise a show outside of Netflix UI.
Which is why Apple withholds fabulous amounts of detail in their financial disclosures.
So nobody's paying them, but Netflix effectively pays more (in the long run) to show you third party content and would prefer you watch content they produce for a one-time upfront cost.
They push you towards exclusive content because it's what differentiates them from the competition.
Makes a lot of sense to push the content that folks can ONLY get on your platform, since that's a reason for customers to stick around. It's too bad they overdo it to the point where I actively dismiss (and get annoyed by constant promotions of) Netflix shows unless a personal friend indicates one is actually worth watching.
Depends on the production but it definitely isn't rule or trend. For example, look at this page with costs to make each episode:
https://movieweb.com/best-sitcoms-of-the-2000s-ranked/
Many of those are Netflix originals. What it means to be an original is that it was on Netflix first and it's the only place you can find it at first. And back in the day, that only applied to the USA (now Netflix does worldwide rights, but House of Cards for example premiered on other networks in Europe at the same time it was released on Netflix).
But once that contract expires, anyone can license it for the next go around. Generally Netflix does a long license and locks up IP rights to prevent that, but that just makes them have to pay even more for the content.
If you look at the cost per hour streamed, the originals definitely aren't the best -- stuff like a show from the 1960s that they got super cheap that ends up being super popular end up there. But the originals are the prestige items, so they're willing to be less efficient there for the unquantifiable brand boost.
1. They've decided to have a single interface for every device and Netflix supports a lot of devices. So it basically can't have any features that require more than a d-pad input.
2. They want to obscure the fact that their catalogue is really quite small. That's why are very limited manual filtering options and no advanced search. You'd very often get 0 results.
3. They're still in the "A/B testing can solve anything" and "we must optimise for engagement!" phase and haven't realised the problem with that. They probably A/B tested showing you stuff you'd already seen, found it increased engagement and said "ok it must be good".
A/B testing. The product org has always been driven by A/B testing, which means it sometimes finds a local maxima which they then stick to. They've also been driven by keeping things simple, both for the user and the developers. Having a single interface means the user gets a consistent experience (ironically broken by having so many A/B tests) and also means that testing on the backend is easier, because you don't have a geometric explosion of combinations of settings to test.
The fewer settings there are the fewer things to test when you want to change something.
> Why would it be bad for me to turn off autoplay for trailers?
Because A/B testing has shown that overall it's better for customer retention. They're willing to give up some users in exchange for the gains they get from having it on.
> Why can't I say "never show me this show again, I'm never going to watch it"?
Because people lie to themselves. A lot of people will say, "Schindler's List is an amazing movie!" and keep it on their watch list, but yet never watch it again, and then will say "Jackass 3 is the dumbest shit I've ever seen" and never put it on their list but watch it 15 times. People's intentions and actions don't always match. Netflix used to have a way to remove stuff from being shown, and then get calls into customer service from people who had chosen that button asking how to get the movie back because they actually want to watch it.
> And why, in this age of AI, and they still putting white text over a white background?
While you could fix this with AI, it would take a heck of a lot of computer power for a relatively small fix for few people (not a lot of people use captions). You'd have to review every film with every set of captions. That's a lot of hours of AI review.
> That last one, especially, made me say "do people at Netflix eat their own dogfood"?
When I worked there, most everyone watched Netflix every day. In fact, the only thing we didn't dogfood was the billing system because we all had free Netflix, and then when it broke, they gave everyone an $8/mo raise and told us all to sign up for paid accounts so that we could test the billing system with different billing days and different payment methods.
But very few that I knew of who used captioning. Most people don't like it and find it distracting. So when there were captioning errors they were usually caught by customers.