The Netflix interface is so bad that I've been wondering if they made it bad on purpose. Over a decade ago when DVDs in red envelopes were the standard they had a table view of all their content and you could sort and filter it to your heart's desire. When they got rid of this, I used their API to build a CLI tool that just listed shows ordered by how much Netflix thought I'd like it. All of this was vastly superior to the current Netflix interface. However, I sometimes would decide that I had watched everything on Netflix and turn it off or even unsubscribe for a few months. Now it's really hard to find out if you have exhausted Netflix. It's easy to spend a lot of time just scrolling though the GUI hoping you'll find something and sometimes you do. Sometimes you find something where it's surprising that it didn't suggest it in the first place. I wonder if this is all by design because they try to increase quantity of engagement and not quality and value gained from the engagement.

Edit: I have some sympathy for this. Engagement is much harder to measure than customer satisfaction. They are looking for the keys under the light because they cannot see anywhere else.

Because they make more money by charging Apple and others.

Why be reasonable when you can be unreasonable and make more money.

The aggregator uses lots of users existing accounts with their real logins. Using appletv again for an example, it wants to check prepend’s specific Hulu, Netflix, hbo, Disney, etc to see new episodes and whatnot related to my specific account.

So it has a real login and, presumably, access to some api from the streamer. But a smaller company that didn’t pay for access could also just login as my accounts and scrape info.