The Netflix Website Gets a Major Upgrade | Hacker News Reader

The Netflix Website Gets a Major Upgrade

blog.netflix.com

138 pointsphilip1209119 comments

What I don't understand is how Netflix seemingly ignores a user's incredibly valuable feedback regarding a given title. For example, you're browsing all the titles and you see some stupid animated movie you have no intention of ever seeing. You select it, to get the detail view, then click "Not interested" or if that doesn't appear (why I don't know), you click one star. You're telling Netflix basically, "I don't wanna see this, ever, so please don't recommend it to me."

But... Netflix keeps recommending it. Come back a day later, it's still there in the list while you're browsing titles. Spend an hour indicating "Not Interested" on all the crap and filler (there is a ton) of streaming content Netflix shows you, and it makes no difference. It's all there the next hour, the next day, the next week.

I reckon Netflix is afraid the truth would be revealed, that they have VERY little streaming content, if they honored a user's "Not interested" and hid those from the genre lists. Why, you might wind up with a handful of titles listed.

But would that be so bad? I would be perfectly fine if Netflix's lists were EMPTY today. I would still come back tomorrow to check to see what was new (gosh, imagine if Netflix sent me a notification of some sort listing out what's been added since last time I looked).

Today's "Major Upgrade" does not, so far as I know, include these kinds of improvements. I sure wish it did.

I'd be interested in seeing what kind of (negative) correlation there is between giving a movie 1 star and watching it. It seems obvious to me that your assumption is true, that if you give a movie 1 star you'll likely never watch it. But human psychology/behavior is pretty stupid and often irrational.

Can't agree more. I can't figure out why this is possibly the case. Similarly I have lots of that I have seen (and rated in Netflix) presented on my home page. Why? I don't even have an hypothesis. Netflix also don't have trailers, which means I have to go to IMDB or Youtube to see a trailer.

Wish I could whitelist the shows to watch in the kids section, most of it has little educational value.

A whitelist feature would be amazing.

I had to cancel my satellite TV subscription because of the Disney channels. All the main protagonists are self obsessed trouble makers that never get their comeuppance.

I would rather run the risk of my kids hearing a youtuber swearing about the latest minecraft addon than watch my kids grow up with Disney shows. At least the Youtubers are causing my children to want to create things and then showing them how.

I think there's simply not enough in the catalog that's more plausible than what they're suggesting.

Because they have the viewer data, they know that what people watch and what people admit they want to watch (even to themselves) are not the same thing.

Netflix does not have "very little" streaming content, where do people get off saying this? Is it because you watch it outside of the US, where the selection is admittedly much smaller?

Netflix in the US may have a lot of streaming content (movies, especially) relative to their streaming competitors but they have very little streaming relative to all the movies and TV shows that have ever been made. Compare their streaming offerings to their disc offerings and you will find very little of what's on disc is also available streaming.

Discs needs to be snail mailed, so the amount of content potentially available to each subscriber at any given moment is tiny, compared to the content available online at any given moment.

So there are very different dynamics going on there when comparing those services.

This is a pet peeve of mine about all of this predictive big data stuff.

There's what people want, and there's what people want. The big assumption in the industry right now is that "what people REALLY want isn't necessarily the same as what they SAY they want".

But isn't that dreadfully cynical to put the emphasis on the "really want" side? Like - I want to eat healthy, but if a bowl of crappy chips were put in front of me, I'd probably eat some. That doesn't mean I don't want to eat healthy, though. It doesn't mean I REALLY want chips.

It's really just that they're invested in serving our urges rather than what we think of as important.

Think of it as our "better selves" versus our "worse selves". Couldn't they also make conclusions about what are better selves are, and suggest that sort of content?

Well, it does say a lot about what is easy to sell to you.

Maybe you want to eat healthy, but that desire doesn't mean squat if you always end up buying fries on the side. Then the health store is better off pushing fries every time, even though you told them you don't like fries.

I used to work at outbound phone marketing (I regret it too), and whenever we were asked to take people off the list, they were kept on, because the marketing company was a dick and because the pool of people who asked not to be bothered again would still contain buyers for the next marketing push.

So knowing better than your customer is hardly a new big data thing (If you'd asked people, you'd end up with faster horses)

Personally I have only watched 1-2 movies from my netflix "My list", so it is hardly a wonder why it is not featured prominently on my netflix page or why those movies aren't used to indicate my suggested content. I know what I want to have seen, but that is not the same as what I want to see.

Honestly I think removing those movies that the user is not interested in from the list that netflix is recommending to you could be related to a scaling/optimisation/coding issue on their side regarding the results from the recommending algorithm they are using then a lack of content issue.

> When you hover your mouse over a title, you will now see a slideshow of images from that movie or show. We hope this slideshow will give you a better feel for what the show is about than reading the description alone.

Well, this is a standard feature of any average Joe's porn site for about 5 years now

There may be different expectations regarding spoilers.

Built this for our site (stream.me) in like a day and a half. Makes you feel good about your work when big companies with much bigger teams "announce" features you have already tackled :)

I would imagine it's much harder to roll out at scale.

Netflix's ui has been pretty terrible for a while, though, I wish they would have an alternative to the grid view. Sometimes I can't find the genre I'm looking for.

Front-end features have nothing to do with "scale". Does it work in the browsers? That is all that matters.

EDIT: FWIW, we also implemented this feature on our last site which was the #63 most visited site in the world at its height. So we have done it "at scale"

Well, you need to find those thumbnails somewhere. So that's an entire backend component right there.

Also, I seriously doubt you anywhere near approached the scale of netflix's data centers. #63 most visited site doesn't compete at all with porn or netflix in terms of sheer bytes.

Just pointing out it's easy to say you can roll something out in a day, but you can never implement a feature without context.

I am certainly not saying have had near the traffic of netflix. But we are a live stream site, so certainly have to deal with more load for generating the thumbnail sprites we use because we do them for every new stream, and every few minutes during the stream

The backend part of it is just ffmpeg, which can do pretty much all of this for you. The scaling is just a matter of throwing more servers at it, which is relatively trivial, expensive but simple. Admittedly my 1.5 days was not including generating the thumbnail sprites. But if you include that we had 2 programmers work on this for a total of less than a week.

> The backend part of it is just ffmpeg, which can do pretty much all of this for you.

Really? it takes in a movie and spits your thumbnails, sans spoilers, sans family un-friendly content, into your data store, already indexed? Across multiple data centers?

Seems like you're making it out to be much more trivial than it is.

EDIT: To be clear, the feature itself has trivial components. But rolling out a new feature requires far, far more than just the frontend code and an ffmpeg script.

Those are goalpost-moving requirements. Netflix didn't say anything about spoilers, etc.

They're common sense requirements.

Sure, so is a pony. If we're wishing. But features cost money. So, in other words, no - not really.

What other product offers that? How is it central to their value proposition; what customer left because ...

Well among other things, netflix DOES need to ensure that e.g. sex scenes don't pop up. This is not a legal requirement, but it will drive families that trusted their kids to not anymore. Additionally, you have to take into account things like "how to avoid getting terrible shots", which is something I'm sure porn sites have looked into.

These are goalpoast moving requirements, but I also wasn't the person making it out to be trivial.

They do? I imagine they already have a way to block shows with sex. So if you're past that and can see the show at all, it seems moot.

Also, all these things are "good ideas", but can you imagine going to your boss and saying. "I have three-9s of the cases covered, and for the vast majority we simply refuse to show slides and almost nobody notices ... But ... I need another six months of tweaking the facial detection to get to four-9s before we ship it. To make sure nobody seems a funny face when they pause the video."

Have you considered what the expected revenue differential between the two systems is (with and without funny-face detection) and have you compared that to the cost of the time spent in a meeting discussing it, let alone the work to implement it, and then to the opportunity cost of not doing other stuff?

These comments about potential difficulties are bike-shedding in action. Nobody has anything to add so they add nothing. I'm sure we could all imagine cases where there were complex restrictions, and that'd be totally cool if these was an article about rule-engines. But it's not.

So you need a bit more time to run it through Mechanical Turk to check for porny scenes and perhaps spoilers. I'm not sure why this is a hard problem.

But perhaps I'm tainted because I find Netflix to be annoying, on the whole. Crappy playback options, iffy streaming of HD (even when torrents have no trouble), inconsistent audio and subtitles, and an atrocious recommendation system that seems aimed at wasting my time than recommending good content. More and more I find myself using Popcorn Time, even if the content is on Netflix.

You misunderstand. I'm not saying it's a hard problem, I'm saying it's a slow problem.

Well the front-end feature is only trivial after you've pulled the frames from the 10k titles, ensured they're spoiler free and not useless shots, and allocated the resources to cache and store them. I think thats where the scale aspect comes in to play. Theres also a certain degree of testing and integration that are effected by scale.

Shouldn't be a scale issue. The number of previews required is O(N) where N is the number of videos, not the number of users, and for Netflix, that's very small compared to a user-generated video site like YouTube. With 10,000 videos (what seems to be an estimate), you could spin up a bunch of EC2 instances and render them in under an hour.

As for serving them, it's also trivial to host on a CDN and serve them on demand (on rollover).

Possibly they'd need to work it into their licensing agreements.

I'm more talking about the data migrations necessary to support the thumbnail fetching. At that scale (including all the bureaucracy), it's slow.

And (likely) tooling for altering/fixing samples, and (likely) updating their transcoding process to include thumbnail generation at all the various sizes and qualities they encode for, and backfilling all the existing titles to fit into all such tooling, and coordinating such a project across what are likely multiple teams with different roadmaps and reporting structures, and doing it all without service interruption (lockstep deployments of all the various moving parts).

So much slow in large organizations. So much.

I imagine there's also licensing issues that aren't present in user or publisher submitted content.

How do you know?

I'm excited to see they're trying new things, and it does look slick.

That said, I just wish they'd get rid of the stupid horizontal scrolling list of movies. It's just not efficient and it works poorly. They could have use these same effects in a vertical list or even 2D grid that has normal button/wheel-controlled scrolling, zooming in when you clicked on a specific movie. But the 1D horizontal list that you can't scroll normally is really limiting and makes me avoid the website.

Yeah when I am being indecisive about what to watch, the scrolling starts to make me feel dizzy.

Just click on the category title above the horizontal list (I hate that, too) to get a grid view.

Me, too.

Until then, under chrome/userContent.css in my Firefox profile folder, I will keep:

    @-moz-document domain(netflix.com) {
    
        .slider .agMovieSetSlider {
            position: relative !important;
            width: 100% !important;
        }
    
        .slider {
            overflow: auto !important;
            height: auto !important;
        }
    }

Edit: It strikes me that this may break with the coming redesign. Oh well, that drawing board's not such a rough thing to be dragged back to.

A "show more" button that appended another row or two would be much better.

I kind of wish they wouldn't have changed it years ago...I feel like (as with just about all software 'updates' these days) they continue to remove useful features (like the ability to actually browse with a modicum of filter options) in favor of 'curating' results for 'you' and new graphics.

I'll continue to use InstantWatcher and other 3rd party resources when I want to find something / browse and then back to Netflix when I know exactly the search term I'm looking for.

Shameless self-plug: You might like our site at https://justwatch.com - all the filter options at your power and it doesn't make dizzy when scrolling :)

Netflix and Amazon Prime- nice! Any plans on integrating Rotten Tomatoes scores?

Yes please. Alternate list display options are nice as well. Generally I browse instantwatcher for new releases with the short synopsis turned on, which includes star ratings and rotten tomatoes where applicable. And please, no hover info, unless it's in the cover art display, as generally I'm viewing on my phone (unless you correctly identify touch events and count them as a hover). It's surprising how many sites get this aspect of mobile usage wrong.

Ratings are on the way, less than a month. The non-optimal UX with the country switcher is due to a significant amount of VPNed users searching for other countries' content in case you were wondering. Still discussing how to improve on that.

Amazon Prime - no chromebook or android tablet support :-( Chromebooks, tablets and Arch Linux are all I run.

Now I really don't feel bad about pirating.

gasp I just selected Netflix and AMP, and then filtered by year to the exact decade I was looking for, on the services I use! I was wishing for this capability just yesterday. This is incredible!!! Thank you.

about 5 seconds on your site and I found more of what I'm looking for than what I imagine would be 5+ minutes of Netflix and 3rd party sites. Thank you for sharing, I'll probably continue to use instantwatcher for finding popular / other people are watching but this site is perfect for drilling down and browsing.

Thanks so much - really curious as to the "why" though! Instantwatcher used to be one of our core inspirations, we found them helpful but pretty ugly back then. What are we still lacking compared to them in your eyes?

So this is based off of limited use of your site but...

- ratings from external sources - ability to queue straight from instantwatcher - similar titles - more info about the movie (actors, awards, genres, etc) on the actual movie page

All that being said, Netflix should have just used the justwatch UI / UX.

Well, that's a pretty big compliment, thanks so much...

As for the features, it tells me we're on the right way to add a lot of those things soon - except for queueing that is. Instantwatcher is one of the handful of apps that was deemed useful enough by Netflix to not be cut off from their API back then, so they still have an ability we won't ever have (and don't want to, as we're focused to have a good experience across all VOD providers).

Was great getting some input on that, thanks for taking the time.

Awesome start! I wanted to build something like this but Netflix shut down their API. Here's a list of features I'd like to see if it helps any.

I'd like to be able to put movies into three groups, want to watch (watch queue), already seen (with a rating), and "have no interest" in seeing.

Then, all my search results would NOT show the movies I've put into one of these three lists, so I only see new content. From the search result list, I can easily put movies into one of my three lists.

Also, if your search results could filter out movies based on buy vs rent, since I have no interest in buying movies online. Also, remove pre-releases, I'm not looking for something I can watch in 5 months, I'm looking for things I can watch right now (GOTs season 5 pre-order).

I think who ever nails this implementation could be a big winner as we need an online tv-guide more than ever. But so far, I only see ways to have the same movies I seen (or don't want to see) thrown in my face over and over again.

As you watch more and more online content, you spend more and more time being offered movies you've already seen and that makes it hard to discover new content in the haystack of stuff you've seen or don't care to see.

Hope that helps.

Hi Ian,

Thanks for the feedback! Rent/Buy filter is already on the short term roadmap. Actually, your main idea is one that we've been dabbling with in various forms close to the one you're describing, as we're mainly dogfooding on the movie discovery UX we'd like to use ourselves.

In the end, it's still just the plain WatchList feature you're seeing for time to market reasons, but we're back to the drawing board and will definitely release something similar in the mid term.

Nice. Bookmarked for future use.

I was going to say that my biggest complaint about the existing Netflix site is for me (who doesn't keep an ongoing account) is the inability to search for films without first having an account. I can't just browse anonymously, see if Netflix has a particular show available for streaming and then sign up for a month to watch it.

I <3 justwatch! I live in Australia, and so I have to have 3 streaming services to get anywhere near the library that even just Netflix has in the US -- being able to search and find what I'm looking for on your site is an absolute god-send, thanks very much!

My only feature request would be rather difficult to implement, but I'd love it all the same: Have Foxtel Play's library in there somehow.

Excellent site. Something's wrong with your Apollo 13 listing [1], the Amazon Prime link points to a documentary about Apollo 13, not the movie.

[1] https://www.justwatch.com/us/movie/apollo-13

Dang, that's even my favorite movie, thanks for noticing...

Actually, getting a decent title matching rate was a problem that proved to be much harder than anticipated and allowed some false positives like this one to slip through. We don't have the resources to curate the catalog by hand (and honestly we don't even want to), so getting smarter at this is one main focus area for us during the next half of a year!

I agree. You used to be able to sort all movies by how much they think you will like it. What a concept! A little over a year ago I actually wrote a script that used their API to get me just that. Less than a month later they shut down the API... I honestly don't know what use case they are addressing. If I know what I am there to watch I just need a search field. If I don't know then there interface is a disaster. It keeps recommending movies they predict I will give a low rating. At the same time I found that they had "The Master" which I loved in the cinema after browsing the page for at least 10 minutes in order to find something. Most of the 10 minutes were spent looking over different lists that mainly contained the same movies I'd already watched or Netflix agrees I won't like.

I also find their rating system to be the worst. I always check at imdb first. Some movies that have 4/10 or fewer starts have 4/5 or even 4.5/5 stars on Netflix.

I can only assume that watching certain movies might be more beneficial to Netflix than others.

Over the past four years, web browsers have changed a lot, becoming more sophisticated and allowing for richer visuals and animations.

I am used to this eye candy already from using it on the Playstation. but what I would really like is an ability to curate my own lists (instead of having just one), things on the stay on my list in the order they were added (pairs or occasional trilogies always end up 'drifting away' from each other for no special reason) and to see more information about who made a film than just 3 actors and a director. What if I want to search for films by a particular screenwriter?

Other missing features: request a film for streaming that's not currently available, so they have some way to gauge demand; a higher-priced streaming tier where you have access to the extra features that come on a disc, like interviews or director commentary; Scene search. Netflix has a massive incumbent advantage now, and a deservedly earned one, but user-side development has slowed to a crawl since they went into producing their own content, and the risk for investors is that the market cares more about user experience than the output of Netflix's TV studio (although I personally think their content division is outstanding).

Oh, and please stop ejecting me from the credits of a film to show me what you think I want to want to watch next. There is nothing more annoying than to be sitting there in a reflective mood following a great film, thinking about what I watched as the credits rol and the music plays, only to get kicked out into a static advert for some other film usually wildly inappropriate/irrelevant. It's like being woken up when you're still dreaming, and every time it happens I want to throw something at the television.

Agreed on al of these. A lot of this used to exist, but it's gone now. Instead we have big pictures and shiny stuff no one needs.

> Other missing features: request a film for streaming that's not currently available, so they have some way to gauge demand;

As a UK user, it'd also be nice to be able to somehow monitor when something that's only available in other territories (i.e. US) becomes available in the UK.

It's built using ReactJS, NodeJS, and FalcorJS

Source: https://twitter.com/NetflixUIE/status/610506318860783616

Was this redesign part of that one blog post from Netflix that criticized ExpressJS? Can't remember off the top of my head when that was posted.

Not really; they were done by different teams.

Is there any info anywhere on when FalcorJS will be released?

I keep hearing praises of Netflix's recommendation engine. I wonder when they will roll that out! Because when I browse Netflix, I have 5 pages of categories, each with upto 75 shows. However, and this is the critical point, each of those categories contains about 60-75% the same shows, presented in different order. And with no respect to genre, to boot.

> Scrolling through rows is now much faster, with a mouse-click advancing a full row at a time.

Jesus. Not only have other competitors had this (Amazon Prime, HBO)...Netflix itself had this nav "feature" before it moved to the tedious mouseover scroll it's had for the past couple of years. The slow-scroll was so infuriating that I thought it had to be the result of some incredibly counter-intuitive A/B insight. But now that they're reverting, it just seems like a poorly conceived idea.

fingers crossed this fixes the netflix recommending me things I've already rated before.

Heads up netflix: if I've rated something, I don't ever want it to be recommended again outside of "watch it again."

Another Netflix annoyance: if I watch the pilot episode of a series, then weeks and months pass, and I never watch another episode of that series, it's probably safe to infer that I didn't like it and you can stop recommending stuff to me based on my "interest" in that series. I feel like there's a few of these really common-sense things that Netflix doesn't pick up on and probably don't require some fancypants algorithm to detect.

Is it possible the fancypants algorithm knows you better than you do, knows you will like that series if you watched 3 episodes instead of just the pilot, and is hoping you'll change your mind and listen to it?

"I know the first couple episodes suck, but stick with it. You'll thank me come season 2."

AKA, the "Parks and Rec" effect.

Its actually the opposite that annoys me: if I was watching a TV series, the last time I was logged in I watched episodes, and there are still remaining episodes, stop asking me to rate the series. Its a minor but consistent annoyance that I'll be 3 episodes into a series and it wants me to rate the entire series.

Or shows that you watched months ago but Netflix does not know about.

Or why you have 5 sreens of categories to choose from, but all categories have the same shows in them, anywhere around 60-75%.

Well, don't get your hopes up. I talked with one of the 'data science' guys at Netflix and he said that user ratings are basically completely ignored in their algorithms. Apparently a large subset of their users actually rate movies before they've seen them, so hiding rated movies would only serve to decrease views overall.

Are they sure this isn't a matter of people having seen the videos through other means? I've rated movies I saw in theater or dvd in netflix before so that it can know me better. Guess that's a waste of time.

I think their data science people don't really respect the users own ability from what I have heard. If someone is rating a film not seen through your platform, it should be obvious that a) they have seen it elsewhere and b) if its a 1 they dont want to see that again

With the new site, will it be possible to:

  - deep link to a movie listing
  - deep link to a start time (like YouTube)

Deep link to listing: yes, as you open up the details view on a title, the URL updates to reflect that. You can use that URL to go straight to the title, for example here is Daredevil: http://www.netflix.com/browse?jbv=80018294&jbp=2&jbr=1

The previous site allowed anonymous viewing of a movie listing, for recommending a movie to a non-subscriber.

The Daredevil movie listing link goes to a login page, is that expected?

Can't wait to see it in action. I didn't care much for the site as it was. My biggest pet peeve was the difference between dvd/streaming interfaces. The DVD version would let you click to advance but the streaming list would only advance while hovering.

Second biggest is they don't have, last I saw, an easy way to see if a movie is now available on streaming when it's on the dvd list.

Maybe I misunderstood how it worked (is there a better way!) but it scrolled too slow for me. I usually wait a month to see if anything is new because of how infrequently they get new movies[0].

[0] streaming seems to be almost all tv shows now and they have those getting on the 'new' list constantly.

On that front...how come FOX/WB/etc don't compete and take those views? Last time I checked FOX only had the last 5 episodes when I really needed the a full season to catch up. Making me go somewhere else for their own content just seems weird.

> On that front...how come FOX/WB/etc don't compete and take those views?

Because it's a lot of work running a dedicated streaming service. Personally, I wouldn't do that. A better model would be licensing + free views (as they already do).

And still no catalogue before purchase.. "We have something interesting, but will show it only after purchase" - very cool.

Isn't the first month free anyway?

You should give them your payment card credentials first. I know they are big but it doesn't mean they can't be hacked. And when you submitted card credentials, only way to remove them is send email to privacy@netflix.com and wait for reply.

You could do what I do: keep an online-charges-only debit account that contains just enough cash to cover recurring services and gets on-demand cash deposits to cover one-off charges.

My bank (Swedbank/Sparbanken Nord) forces you to do it like that. They won't approve online payments on your regular card, instead you have to go to their website and create a temporary card number with a limited balance and an expiration date counted in months rather than years.

As a customer I prefer the US model: Give your card number to pretty much everyone, mark off the fraudulent/unwanted transactions on your account each month, carry on.

Frankly, I don't want the hassle -however small- of having to dispute recorded charges. I much rather prefer that fraudulent charges be declined for reasons of insufficient funds. [0]

It might surprise you to learn that I manually instruct my bank to send checks to my creditors each and every month. Maybe I'm nuts. shrug

[0] Yes, I recognize that there's a potential race condition that might enable a fraudulent txn while denying me the ability to complete one of my own txns. Not much I can do about it with the tools that my otherwise wonderful bank gives me. :)

I wish they would bring back plain text titles under each cover image. Hovering over each image isn't an adequate solution.

What frontend framework was used? Any lessons learned? I hear Netflix uses Ember, Angular, and React for different applications. I imagine a wonderful eng blog post will be posted in the near future :)

> With the new Netflix website, we’ve created a richer, more visual experience, and a website that works more like an app and less like a series of linked web pages. Information appears in-line and in context rather than on a separate page, which makes exploring the catalog faster than ever before.

Eww.

So now linking something to someone is broken, the back and forward may or may not work, middle click definitely won't work, and all for what? So they look a little cooler? Meh.

Have you actually tried this, or are you just speculating? I just did, and linking still works. Looks like they still have separate pages for movies/shows. But even for single-page sections, I'd assume they are updating the hash so linking works.

Hasn't rolled out to my account yet. Per Netflix's blog post they're doing it in blocks.

I was replying to what Netflix said. Which is all the information I have available to me until they deploy it to my account.

You're assuming they don't have updating URLs. That would be a massive oversight. Almost all popular SPAs that I use have linking implemented, so I don't know why you'd assume Netflix would fail to do this.

Technically it might be completely rebuilt, but I guess that most people won't notice. They added more animations and a video element on top, both of which makes it slower.

As functionality and layout are the same as in the old version (which was pretty good already), I don't see how this one is "more like an app and less like a series of linked web pages".

I'm a bit jaded but it looks like a really great change to focus on what you can watch versus reminding you that there used to be a movie in this space that you can no longer watch.

I love Netflix as an instant streaming service, and I really dislike the hoops that big media makes folks jump through, but after having yet another movie I recommended to a friend that I had streamed on NetFlix but had disappeared, I switched back to buying movies on disc that I want to have in my library.

my question is, do i still have to google some arbitrary and arcane silverlight hotkey code in order to change video quality?

Silverlight has been ditched for over a year now, so I guess no ;-)

I don't understand why the console Netflix apps have the ability to show you exactly (ish) the quality you're currently streaming at (on PS3, hit 'select' button and it'll say "720p" or whatever it's at), but the PC browser client doesn't.

Press ctrl+alt+shift+d . The video resolution will appear, along with a bunch of other debugging info.

The same hotkey (Control+alt+shift+S) still works for me with Chrome in the HTML5 player and shows the same interface as before.

I'm looking forward to a follow-up article from their development and/or ops team. Netflix tech articles are very interesting. I'm sure there is a good tech story behind this upgrade.

The killer part of this redesign is the in-context, in-line information cards which makes shifting through the netflix's catalog a breeze.

Does anyone know why you cannot filter by rating the same way you can by genre? Is it a hard problem to solve?

I've always thought the reason was to remove the bias of only watching movies everyone else likes (i.e. only those that majority gave high ratings) but I'm shooting blindly here. It would be great if someone from the team gave input

I honestly wonder if they try to direct users towards certain content because they might have different deals around the content that makes watching certain movies for them better than others. That's the only explanation I can come up with for why they would make finding something worth watching so hard.

Unless you're logged in the site is useless. I'm not a client so I can only comment as a prospective buyer. There isn't much to comment, though. It's a horrible experience. The help search is also useless. Tried the following search terms: pricing, plans, movies, guide; the results are always the same, the first result is always "Can I stream Netflix in Ultra HD?".

No word on whether any of this will apply for those who use a game console.

Unless I'm mistaken, this update makes it in line with the consoles. I have an Xbox One, and it currently looks much like the site does now.

You know what would be better? Ditching Silverlight. Fucking thing crashes on me every few minutes. I've been trying to watch the last 6 minutes of an episode of HoC for about 30.

I've been using the Netflix "HTML5"[0] player for what seems like at least six months. Check your playback settings and flip the "Use HTML5 player" switch.

[0] It's actually the EME player, which uses a binary blob for video decryption. But, The Industry calls this DRM scheme HTML5 video decoding, so whatever.

They call it HTML5 player because it's using the HTML5 <video> tag and using native browser controls. Being decoded by an external module isn't determinant - in fact, Firefox uses the same infrastructure (GMP) for both encrypted and unencrypted videos.

Oh, I know why it's called what it's called.

Lumping patent and copyright issues under the "Intellectual Property" umbrella harmed productive non-wonky discussion of the issues. I expect that lumping DRM'd and unencumbered video playback under the same umbrella will be similarly damaging to non-wonky discourse.

As mentioned they've had HTML5 playback for browsers that support which is basically Safari, Chrome and even Firefox I think.

Safari was the first browser that got supported and it's been working on Macs for ages without Silverlight installed.

I've sort of given up on Netflix but maybe I'll take a look. I mean, I still pay my monthly fee but I now watch all of my stuff through Plex. I just subscribe to a show and it appears in my Plex server, with a much better ui than netflix.

I'm overseas and at first I tried to use the Plex Netflix plugin and connect to Netflix through a VPN that I would have dynamically open whenever it went to a range of ip addresses, but Netflix's amazon range kept changing - I assume to stop people like me from accessing from overseas.

And so I gave up trying to do it 'proper' and now I just download their shows and watch them from my own server. I live in a country where it's legal to download - just not share, and I think what I do is completely reasonable.

But I at least still pay my monthly fee.

How do you use plex with your TV?

I set something up with a RPi a while ago, but performance was ridiculous. Chromecast support from mobile app was also buggy.

Haven't owned a TV since 1999... I don't like how they become the focus of the room it's in. However, I do like the new oled tvs, especially the super thin one that can be hung up at any time (prototype only now) and may get one when they're available.

PlexConnect with an AppleTV here, works pretty well:

https://blog.plex.tv/2013/06/04/introducing-plexconnect-an-a...

Roku ftw.

The Netflix website is a piece of shit. Their recommendation system is crap. I liked a Robert Redford movie, now even his crap ones show up as five stars. They have decent movies but it's impossible to find. Their search sucks. Their foreign category has everything and the kitchen sink. Their scroll gives about ten movies then is done, even though they have a hundred movies fitting the title. If they had a good system, you wouldnt need instantwatcher and whatdoiwatchonnetflix. It's good to know that the major upgrade involves - ooh I dont have to click anymore, how cool.

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