I wanted to re-watch this on Netflix but it seems they removed it some time ago and have no plans to bring it back. It seems the interactivity features were obsoleted from their app platform as they were hard to support?
X to doubt. The tech worked fine. The real issue is that nobody wants choose-your-own-adventure TV, which has been proven again and again.
But surely Netflix could have setup 1 to 3 of the "best" variants of the Bandersnatch and let people watch those? Even a "directors cut" based on how the director chose the path, would suffice.
The content is entirely gone right now. Which is pretty tragic as it was excellent.
It's officially gone, but you can acquire the raw video through other means and plug it into this open source reimplementation of the frontend: https://mehotkhan.github.io/BandersnatchInteractive/
Edit: For that matter, I actually can't seem to find the 720p releases either.
This is from 7 years ago but you can see if there's any helpful discussion attempting to use the initial release: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bandersnatch/comments/adnn2h/github...
Your theory fits fine with “We’re not going to make a series like this or turn it into a genre”, but not so well with “we already made this thing and it was really popular, but we’ve decided to take it off the platform”
https://www.polygon.com/22286070/netflix-interactive-shows-m...
They're still trying to get into video games—they just bought the rights to FIFA, for goodness sakes—so they should make use of their ready-made content.
There is no way the actual code for selecting choices is particularly complicated. Maybe as part of a larger codebase it could become tech debt, but on its own?
If I were to guess, it had less to do with being "too difficult" and more to do with "not being worth it". I.e. they have the numbers for how many people were watching the limited interactive content from years ago, they know whether they plan on having more interactive video content, and they know how much it is to maintain across different apps (and likely don't want to fragment their service availability to support something they identify as a declining niche). Just because they may be getting into games does not mean it makes sense to have support for other interactive stuff people hardly ever watch.
They tried something different, it didn't work out to be popular enough to bother with for the rest of time, and they moved on.
That's what I mean, too difficult for the expected return.
> A separate app would be a lot more work. Not only do you need to publish separate apps on all of the platforms you still need to maintain that separate app
We're talking about, what, Android and iOS? Those are the only platforms where Netflix has been publishing games AFAIK. I'm not suggesting they maintain it on every platform with a Netflix app!
I just don't believe it would be much work. If it's an app, it doesn't even have to handle streaming, it can just play the local video file. Heck, we have a fan-made codebase we can use as a reference:
https://github.com/joric/bandersnatch/blob/master/bandersnat...
<500 lines of code, plus two json files which are admittedly much longer but look auto-generated. I assume they came from Netflix, which means they exist already.
Even acknowledging that an official version might necessitate more than this, it just shouldn't be a big lift, even relative to a very small number of users. If it is a big lift, then something else is very wrong inside Netflix.
Netflix must have spent millions of dollars producing Bandersnatch. It was critically acclaimed. I can understand not making more—but not doing a modicum of work to keep it in their catalog?