I complain about how long it takes my guests to pick a movie on Netflix + Hulu + Apple + whatever else I have this week, but if I'm being perfectly honest we used to spend more time at Blockbuster. Especially if you included transit time.
Because Blockbuster had a lot more movies than Netflix streaming ever has. And you can scan a rack of movies faster than you can scan in Netflix.
I cancelled my netflix account because I realized I was spending more time looking for things to watch than actually watching things. I was spending more time with netflix in a bored/annoyed state than an entertained state.
I'm finding myself in HBO way more than Netflix these days. I think part of it is the library science side of it. When I go into the HBO app, it's one swipe and one click to continue watching the last thing I was watching. Everything else is well organized too, with good separation between the list of all content in categories vs the content they're promoting.
In Netflix, not only is it hard to find the last thing I was watching, but everything else is mixed together and worse: it moves around nearly every time I open the app. An endless amount of categories and lists seem to be invented all the time and are at the top of the interface where my "continue watching" category should be every single time. I get it, you're creative Netflix, and you want to promote stuff but that's not as helpful as consistency... and the proof is that you're losing me.
Let me finish what I'm in the middle of and promote your stuff afterwards, or at least have a consistent shortcut to get to the continue watching category much more easily.
Me too. I distinctly remember sitting for 30 minutes trying to pick something and then just browsing the web and not finding anything. There were movies I'd want to watch, it's just that Netflix didn't have them.
I plan on joining again for a bit, watch a few shows they made in the years since I left, then probably dropping them again.
I spend A LOT of time downloading and organizing my movie collection, but somehow I enjoy even that time, alongside the occasions I can watch a whole movie (between job and family obligations)
Really? Here in Brazil I remember Blockbuster having a fairly limited number of options, mostly the new releases. The old pop and mom video store usually had way more options (because they didn't throw anything away most of the time).
There are still days I can't find anything I want to watch on Netflix but it seems way better than the DVD/Blueray situation we had here.
It could very much be a function of town size, and year. There was always a prominent and large section dedicated to recent releases but once you wandered off into Sci Fi or Action or Horror, there were a lot of classics and quite a few B movies available.
It's important to keep in mind that there are some Dark Patterns in Netflix to try to fool you into thinking there is more back inventory than there really is. And now they've started flipping the cover art even in My List every time you wrap around. If it happened once in a while I'd think they were A/B testing on different cover art to see what happens, but the fact it happens in your List and every time you navigate is pretty damned sketchy.
Also as someone else complained, their UI has sucked sucked sucked for a while now. I think the only reason people don't complain is that Hulu has somehow created one that's substantially worse. Honestly the whole management chain for the UI team at Hulu should be fired. How that abomination survived so many approvals is shocking.
Another challenge is to understand the impact of changing artwork that we show a member for a title between sessions. Does changing artwork reduce recognizability of the title and make it difficult to visually locate the title again, for example if the member thought was interested before but had not yet watched it? Or, does changing the artwork itself lead the member to reconsider it due to an improved selection? Clearly, if we find better artwork to present to a member we should probably use it; but continuous changes can also confuse people.
Bullshit. They change it within a single session and if I’m ever on a room with a netflix employee they’re not leaving until the understand on a very profound level how infuriating this is.
If it’s a bug they need to fix it. If it’s on purpose they need to fix their brains.
As I tried to articulate this I realized that Hulu and Netflix now have the same problem. In netflix, right arrow, up and down always mean the same thing, but left changes meaning in an unpredictable way. In Hulu it’s the up button.
To get out of a list you have to walk off the beginning. In both cases there’s now a very small limit to the number of things you want in the screen because you’ll have to walk back or go clear through to get out. It reinforces having a scarcity of entries or too many subsections.
They should go back to using the menu button to escape out of a subsection. Make the subsection four or five elements wide and continuous scroll. But they keep doubling down on their poor use of real estate. Adding things like auto playing previews that some of us hate.
Hulu used to work like this, which is why I have such venom. My tv had the old UI on it, so I stopped using the Apple TV version for a year or two. But when I got the new TV I was stuck with the awful, and they’ve done basically nothing since.
The interface is slow (though I think the actual design is decently usable but nothing great).
Which categories you get are random, yes you can search for specific tags but that's a bit of a hassle and involves typing on a remote. What I'd really like would be both custom and sticky categories. Categories that will always be shown to me (simply by liking a category), and sticky custom categories by combining tags (like creating a action comedy category by combining the action and comedy tags and having that category always show up on my feed).
Netflix lacks personalization IMHO, because algorithms will never replace my actual taste. Let me tell you what I want you to show me.
Also, they should make a drill down search (minimize typing, please!). What I mean is a simply search menu with 5-10 major category types (genre, actor, director, tags) then being able to continue filtering by different categories on the fly.
Also, add a completely optional where I can see what my friends liked (with their permission ofc). That way I can, hassle free, get recommendations from people I trust.
You can even make public feeds! Famous movie critic public feed, etc.
So many possibilities to improve Netflix, I wouldn't even know where to start.
I miss actual 1-5 star ratings. I want to know if a movie is rated by a majority of people to be more than 4 stars. If its not I don't want to waste my time watching it. I don't care if the movie is rated to be a 95% match for my wife.
The star rating was never the value of everyone's opinion, it's always been based on what Netflix thought you would rate the film[1]. So the % match hasn't really changed. Being able to give an honest opinion though, has. Now it's just a binary "yes" or "no", which is super annoying.
At one point they had the star ratings where you could see two different star ratings. The primary one was of users like you and then in smaller print could see average of all users. Going back even further you could see see you friends' ratings of a title.
I miss it too, but I expect that the vast majority of people only rated films they watched as 5 stars, 1 stars, or no rating (meh, or the same as 3 stars). Most things I watch still don’t get a rating, so it’s really a reduction of 5 levels to 3, not a binary.
"Here in Brazil I remember Blockbuster having a fairly limited number of options, mostly the new releases."
This was exactly what Blockbuster was like in New York.
They focused on mainstream, mostly blockbuster movies (hence the name, maybe).
For a really good selection, you had to go to independent video rental stores, like Kim's Video in Manhattan, which had way, way, waaaay more movies available than any Blockbuster store I've ever been in could dream of. There were some other independent video rental stores scattered across NYC and Long Island with similarly good selections.
Also, Blockbuster movies were often cut or censored, so you had to go to an independent video rental store to find uncut films. I've heard some people dispute that Blockbuster ever carried such films, but I'm far from the only one who remembers this happening. Search around on the web, and you'll see others reporting the same thing.
At a certain point, Blockbuster had some sort of "guaranteed to be in stock" kind of thing, which meant they would just have walls and walls of one single movie.
The store itself was big enough, but their use of space was not very efficient.
I'm not sure why they chose to have that focus, but it was clearly a choice on their part, not something they were forced to to.
My guess is that they did what they thought was most profitable for them, because most of the customers they catered to just preferred to watch mainstream, very popular movies.
Good independent video stores had a different model of catering towards viewers with more discerning tastes, so had extensive selections of more obscure films.
Blockbuster, from what I heard, was pretty data-based with both predictive (demographic driven) and continuous modeling/monitoring of demand for each corporate location (they also had franchises, which may have been different) which drove quantity and selection of stock.
> Good independent video stores had a different model of catering towards viewers with more discerning tastes, so had extensive selections of more obscure films.
Of course independents had to focus on the market underserved by Blockbuster, even if that was a less profitable segment.
"Blockbuster, from what I heard, was pretty data-based with both predictive (demographic driven) and continuous modeling/monitoring of demand for each corporate location (they also had franchises, which may have been different) which drove quantity and selection of stock."
I'm not sure how much that kind of demographic data and prediction/modeling was worth.
Even now, though I've rated hundreds of movies on Netflix, Netflix routinely recommends me movies that I absolutely hate. Their recommendations are far more often wrong than right.
Blockbuster didn't have individual customer's ratings of the movies they watched to go on, and the technology and predictive/modeling algorithms they had access to 20 or 30 years ago must have been far, far worse than Netflix has now.
> Blockbuster didn't have individual customer's ratings of the movies they watched to go on
But they weren't doing individual recommendations, they were trying to predict aggregate demand for titles at local stores; aggregate predictions of the type are a lot easier to get usefully correct that individualized predictions of subjective quality.
My family moved around a lot, and I saw many types in the US, including Blockbusters with almost nothing but newest releases, Blockbusters with almost every movie & video game I could imagine, and several in between.
I remember Blockbuster seeming to have lots of selection in the 90s and then they beat out a bunch of smaller stores and chains, then seemed to have less incentive not to suck and by the mid 2000s was as you say, limited, mostly new releases.
I can't recall going to Blockbuster to rent something I had already seen. Usually more time was spent when they introduced the walls of empty boxes. Sometimes you found a case which served as representing a physical copy behind the counter, while most of the time was waiting for employees to check their return slot to see if what you wanted was there without being scanned back into inventory yet.
Because Blockbuster had a lot more movies than Netflix streaming ever has. And you can scan a rack of movies faster than you can scan in Netflix.