Netflix Launches Button for Indecisive Couch Potatoes (protocol.com) 65
Ever spent way too long browsing Netflix's catalog? You're not alone. From a report: "We've all been there" Netflix Product Innovation Director Cameron Johnson admitted in a conversation with Protocol this week. "People have a really hard time choosing. It's just kind of a human problem." To help consumers overwhelmed with choice, Netflix is adding a "Play Something" button to its TV interface this week. Pressing it automatically launches a new show or movie based on the service's existing personalized recommendations. And if it's not the right title for the moment, consumers can click to play something else. The button seemingly represents a small update to Netflix's ever-evolving TV UI. However, the many months of testing that went into it show that the company is well aware of the challenges that come with building brands around original content from scratch, and the way Netflix implemented the feature sets it apart from attempts of others in the industry to bring a more TV-like experience to streaming.
Someones paying someone to post netflix stories (Score:1)
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It is finding something I want to WATCH!!
WTF happend to mainstream movies and TV shows I've actually heard of before?
IT seems all that NF has these days is their home made crap.
I've heard some of them are ok, but I"m not the type that is going to spend my limited time trying things out at random to see if I like it or not.
I did kinda do that once, with their show I think was called the Santa Clarita Diet...it was pr
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Yes! It is partially this and partially their stupid interface.
Streaming services, in general, have the worst interfaces that somehow keep changing, but always remaining basically the same: "Here's 400 things completely unrelated to anything you've ever even shown an interest in before."
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The simplest change probably needs to be the hiding of unwanted content, you know bury it away to the bottom of every list and sections. A hiding/burying function, so you search through less.
Couch potatoes of the world, UNITE! (Score:2)
It would be interesting to correlate editors with activity in the discussions. Unfortunately, the activity too often seems to be negative, even misogynous, as in the example of this sad and vacuous FP.
However, the title of the story did remind me of this old joke, "Couch Potatoes of the World, Unite! You have nothing to lose but your free time." http://eco-epistemology.blogsp... [blogspot.com]
Part of the ekronomics thing, but recently I started thinking about a new angle combing UBI, probability, and prison reform. In the
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I hope you're not operating any heavy machinery....
How to pick an interesting story for Slashdot? (Score:2)
I thought I had offended a couch potato. But now I see it was my mistake.
Let me clarify. In my first paragraph, I was mostly responding to the FP, and I was dismissing your gibberish as part of the FP effect. I even said so pretty clearly in that first paragraph. But I guess I should add a bit of clarification about that dismissive paragraph. I had just scanned the Slashdot front page and noticed a long string of stories with few comments. I'm taking few comments as a metric of low interest. (Engagement or
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I would much prefer a website that keeps track of the idiots and just keeps them out of my sight.
:-) You have to roll yer own.. or pay for a service to censor your internet for you.
Public masturbation of 1673220 (Score:1)
Z^-1
They'll definitely be tracking you :-) (Score:1)
I'm sure you fit right in
Public masturbation of 1673220 (Score:2)
Z^-2
:-) Most people prefer to defecate in private (Score:1)
You should consider doing the same
Public masturbation of 1673220 (Score:2)
Z^-3
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Nothing that's really mainstream is on NF .. it's old crap. We try and try to find new stuff and we come up with nothing. If i make a search for something im interrested in it's always on some other network , rent and all the crap. Really .. they were good at some point but they became boring. Dont knwo what they're trying to do .. besides going bankrupt.
Congratulations, you just invented (Score:3)
the "switch channel" button.
Re:Congratulations, you just invented (Score:5, Interesting)
Before I switched to Plex, I was using XBMC for my media center. One of the best plugins I installed was "TV Mode." Well, I think that is what it was called. But anyway, what it did was pick a random show and a random place to start in the show. I could push the up or down button on the remote and it would switch to another random show and time. You could continue your journey into random shows, or go back to something you had already passed.
Re:Congratulations, you just invented (Score:5, Insightful)
Except it will make an algorithmically driven choice for you.
Now what I would like is much better search functionality, but from Netflix's point of view that's not so great because it means they have to have content to satisfy diverse tastes. It's much more profitable to *shape* tastes than it is to cater to them. Why search for a hit when you can manufacture one.
It's not just media distribution companies; advertising on the Internet in general struggles mightily to stuff you into a pigeonhole that will contain large numbers of people. I'm not a big fan of superhero movies, I can take them or leave them. Mostly I watched them for years because my kids wanted to see them. Yet I am constantly bombarded with superhero movie content in my news feeds because my profile identifies me as a nerd and nerds are supposed to love superhero movies. It's annoying.
Another useless tool (Score:2)
What I -actually- need from Netflix is a button that lets me move the trash out of my sight so it doesn't distract from finding something to watch. The button should let me rank an offered show as follows:
Queue (add to)
Interested (keep offering it to me)
Seen / Not interested (move to the back of the line of things offered)
Never (do not offer me the show again unless I explicitly search for it)
Even more helpful would be a return of the "coming soon" list that lets me queue up discs releasing in the next week
So TikTok then (Score:2)
Netflix is going to pains to not say its AutoPlay is basically TikTok's method.
Meanwhile I have 600 videos in my Watch Later queue on YouTube if I have time.
Is this new? (Score:1)
Hasn't this been in Netflix for a while now? Maybe it's just new in the TV interface?
Re: Is this new? (Score:2)
I've had it on my Samsung TV since early this year or late last year. Not really new.
This week? Must be older than that. (Score:2)
Pretty sure we've had this all year. Heck my girlfriend even pointed out how good it was a few weeks ago that they added a "play something else" button if you didn't appreciate the first guess.
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I was about to say the something similar. This rolled out in Canada at least 5-6 weeks ago. It's nothing new.
Beta testers (Score:2)
I also have it and I'm in Canada. I suspect we've been beta testing it for our American cousins.
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Could be, OP here currently living in the Netherlands.
Re: This week? Must be older than that. (Score:2)
Yup. I've had it since late last year or early this year. Maybe we were part of a beta test.
I did not get the "sleep timer" that was tested in January, but I did get audio only mode on my Android, which was awesome - but disappeared last week
Worthless (Score:5, Insightful)
The new button is worthless, because Netflix's recommendation is very broken, and has been for years. Plus, it's not new; been there for at least weeks if not months.
The problem he is trying solve could be much more easily solved with a button that says "Don't ever recommend this piece of crap to me again." The problem with trying to find something in Netflix is that they keep forcing you to wade through the same voluminous reeking sewage every time to find anything.
I dunno about your guys... (Score:5, Insightful)
But Netflix recommendations are almost always for stuff I don't want to see. Randomly selecting something from that list is not going to do me any favors, it'll just pop up the latest garbage juoice they've squeezed out.
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Agree.
Dear Netflix,
It's not that I'm "indecisive." It's not that there are too many choices. It's that there are not any good choices. There's just nothing that looks remotely interesting to me. I spend hours going through your recommended shows in various categories, desperately trying to find something decent to watch, something I won't be stupider after watching. I often just give up. I'm near ready to give up on you entirely.
- A frustrated customer.
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We have your money and don't care, sucker.
- Netflix
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I am helping, I pay them every month. This isn't open source, making a useful product isn't the burden of the customer. With that said, I up/down vote things I watch almost all the time and it still gets it laughably wrong.
Except Netflix's suggestions are terrible (Score:5, Interesting)
That's great except Netflix's suggestions are terrible. Netflix has decided I only watch anime and action movies and that's all it ever suggests for me to watch. It pretty much always suggests the same stuff and none of it's stuff I'm actually interested in watching.
Part of the problem is that Netflix offers no information on why it thinks you might want to watch a thing. It just gives a match score. "Oh, this is a 98% match! Watch it!" Is it any good? Who knows, Netflix removed review scores. So you scroll through page after page of what's basically a poster and a name that's maybe associated with a genre and that's basically all you get. If you carefully tap on the "details" thing you can get a brief summary.
It also helps that Netflix exclusives are pretty much guaranteed to die before finishing their story. Found something that sounds really interesting? Yay! Oh, but it's a Netflix exclusive. So that means it's going to either end on a cliffhanger or end in a hyper-accelerated mess as the writers hurry to end the story because Netflix decides which shows to cancel based on what they claim are careful data-driven analysis rather than give the show a concrete number of seasons to work with.
What Netflix really needs to do is add something to their UI to let you see review scores so you'd have any idea if a show is worth watching without having to cross-reference Metacritic or whatever on your own. It would also be nice if they'd offer more "outside your bubble" content to make it easier to find stuff that you might be interested in that Netflix hasn't seen you watch before.
As it is, I only ever really watch stuff on Netflix if it's been recommended by people I know.
Re:Except Netflix's suggestions are terrible (Score:4, Insightful)
It's also very likely that Netflix's suggestions have nothing to do with *my preferences* and have everything to do with Netflix trying to bump viewership of content that benefits Netflix, whether it's boosting ratings of their originals or keeping more expensive licensed content at arm's length because they pay per-view fees.
I'm not sure that Netflix actually licenses content with a pay-per-view fee, but honestly it would not surprise me at this point if it was happening. It's in Netflix's interest to drive down licensing costs and in licensed content providers interests to make sure that actual views get them paid.
If Netflix really wanted to fix engagement and the "nothing on" problem, they would just wipe really shitty content from their library, provide meaningful ratings and a suggestion system that could be actively tweaked by end users to deliver better recommendations.
Remember when Netflix was new and they were kind of a leader in pushing for accurate recommendation systems? Now its just about pushing their content agenda and seemingly hiding actually good content for whatever reason.
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wipe really shitty content from their library
Or add more variety. They used to have a decent DVD catalog, with stuff that wasn't likely going to make it to streaming soon, if ever. But that seems to have disappeared.
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When I was a DVD subscriber, I found that over time movies that were more fringe became harder and harder to get. I suspected that the supply of physical DVDs of these movies was constrained by their original press run and as copies wore out, were stolen or whatever, they weren't replaced.
I had a number of movies in my DVD queue that went from "short wait" to "long wait" to "unknown".
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Netflix's categories / genres also suck Or I should say the lack of granularity.
Sometimes I want to watch ONLY Sci-Fi .. .NOT Sci-Fi and Fantasy.
Stop lumping all this stuff together so I can find specific stuff I'm interested.
> Netflix removed review scores.
Yup, that is part of the problem. If a movie / show only has 40% ratings I probably don't want to watch it regardless of how it "was recommended" such as crap like Hardcore Henry [imdb.com]
> It would also be nice if they'd offer more "outside your bubble" c
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Hardcore Henry. That was the ONLY film I have *EVER* walked out of in a theater. It was that bad.
Money Making Opporunity! (Score:3)
How long before Netflix will be taking money and slipping in 'promoted' shows there?
Worked for me (Score:2)
I must have been part of a test group - I've had this for months. Used it once and it brought up a season of 99 that I had missed, so yay.
Auto-playing is annoying (Score:2)
I wish they'd get rid of the autoplay. I'd rather look at info on a title... who are the actors, a summary like in the old days. Autoplaying just makes me skip half the stuff out there since I don't want it added to "my list".
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I find that super annoying as well, but it's configurable.
You can disable autoplay when you log in via computer to the website and go to settings.
It wasn't difficult to find for me.
Auto-playing is annoying DELIBERATELY (Score:2)
Netflix has a control for it on the desktop version, but it is NOT functional on Nvidia Shield (other Android?). Once you click into a title to get a bit more information, autoplay begins, regardless of the setting. When I called to complain, I was told it was intentional.
The setting does work at the top-level display of the Shield, and both levels on Wii U.
The new rating system is also very lame/annoying. If my only two choices are up/down, then an interesting, but not stellar, title is either not rated
What do you meen "choosing"? (Score:2)
Hoping there may something good this time.
I may be a niche watcher, but most I like I have seen, I just hoping this time they added someting good, or something I may have missed.
My kid will kill me if I cancel subscription though, coz there is some good kids stuff on Netflix.
Netflix is shrinking... (Score:1)
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I think there's a wide spectrum of segments with Netflix ineptly trying to cater to all of them while at the same time not bothering to fix or improve their existing features such as recommendation and user interface. Their catalog size is their main claim to fame. They're slowly losing that, which leaves them as just another player in terms of original content.
What a waste of time (Score:2)
If you're unsure what to watch, maybe do something else? Besides giving up your time to watch something, now you can be as lazy as not even making an effort to actively choose what to watch? Can people be any more passive than this? Maybe Netflix should suggest non-watching activities that I might enjoy, based on my viewing preferences, like books, videogames, music, theater, places in my hometown etc. Oh wait, but that means no zombie-viewing on Netflix.
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The root cause (Score:1)
The root cause of people having problems deciding what to watch is that there isn t much worth watching on Netflix. I agree with other posters that a not interested button to remove the same old suggestions would help.
Great (Score:2)
Good shows are well-written. That's whether you will probably like it or not, not genre similarities.
Because you watched (great show you binged) here's a list of crap shows nobody watched that are superficially like it in all ways except quality.
Channel surfer button would be better (Score:1)
"Adding something"? (Score:3)
I've seen this on my Roku for weeks, maybe months.
Haven't tried it, but my wife did, and she was bored with the selection.
They added in France weeks ago (Score:1)
To help consumers overwhelmed with choice, Netflix is adding a "Play Something" button to its TV interface this week
Are we even worse ditherers than Americans?
It's a shitty bandaid to paper over the lack of new content for months.
(Ugh "bandaid", "paper", metaphors in the mixer).
Is this news? (Score:3)
The real problem... (Score:2)
is that Netflix has nothing worth watching. Adding some magical Play Something button is not going to improve the quality of the content. I cancelled Netflix a long time ago but when I was a subscriber what I found myself doing was scrolling endlessly through the titles trying to find something at least remotely interesting to me and eventually giving up and either going to YouTube (or something similar) or simply turning off the TV and doing something else.
The Play Something button is their attempt to prev
Triggered Apple fans got mod points. (Score:2)
But not the brains to get that I was criticizing Netflix.
Oh well, they will soon lose the ability to make that choice, and talk themselves in to "liking" it too. ;)
LOL we've passed idiocracy (Score:2)
...even the potato-people in Wall-E still made CHOICES.
Now modern internet-addicted people don't even need to do that.
I tend to know what I want to watch... (Score:2)
It takes maybe 5 minutes to *try* to find something new you like on Netflix and a button that randomly picks something from an algorithm that is so flawed, it has yet to suggest ANYTHING I actually was unaware was there, isn't going to fix that.
There's now just so much crap on Netflix and with the market so ridiculously fractured between different streaming competitors, heck, sometimes I just damn well download things I want to watch - it's just less trouble.
"Damn, that show looks great, is it on Netflix? N
Not as innovative as the shuffle button on Prime (Score:2)
For when you are tired of watching episodes in order!
Don't judge a book by it's cover (Score:2)
The problem with Nexflix and other video sites is that it's hard to figure out what's good from the crap (subjective as that may be). The cover photo tries to portray everything in the best possible light, but that just makes it harder to decide.