Netflix has a problem that the front page is now filled with "B-rated" rather than "A-rated" content for more money than before. The amount of content that they spent money on in the past is hardly discoverable, genre search is barely exposed in the interface. You have to rely on 3rd party sites to find links to category selections, say Epic movies based on true events... good luck finding what they have in this category in the AppleTV or Roku apps. They also don't allow to exclude content that one is not interested in, I want no superheroes, no animated stuff, no dei, etc - and yet every time I launch the app it is there front and center and I just hate this. And if I watched 2 WW2 movies it doesn't mean that's the only thing I'm interested in in the recommended section. I want to exclude producing studios as well, like Vox, let me tell Netflix what I don't like.
So if you start looking outside of their interface - why then not just finish and get the movie elsewhere?
Finally, pricing is not flexible, what if I want infrequent 4k UHD streaming on a single device - why do I pay for 4 streams as if I'm streaming 24/7? At this point, I'm better off with Netflix Pay Per View (if this was offered). I keep paying for this service just because I can and just because I might watch something - but I find it more and more frustrating to watch something...
The funny thing is they want to have a tech company valuation and everything you are describing is a tech issue that is easily solvable but they won’t do it.
They are a content creation company/studio now. Their price to earnings (PE) ratio is 45 for some reason and they are part of the FAANG acronym for some reason. I can’t even find anything I want to watch on there and we cancelled it until Stranger Things comes out again. Then we will cancel again. The PE for Universal Studios is 12. Paramount is -7.
They are not bugs but features. The problem they have is that their catalog is mostly filler content at this point. If they addressed the "bugs" you'd be looking at a fairly sparsely populated page with mostly stuff you've already seen.
Netflix is designed to suggest that they have more content than they actually have and that the reason you haven't found anything worth watching just yet isn't that they don't have it but that it's behind the next page of filler content. That's why they have the horizontal scrolling and the endless generic groups of the same content that you've already seen. It's all circular. It doesn't matter how you navigate, it's always the same stuff that surfaces.
I cancelled my subscription last year. I'm planning to re-enable it in one month bursts only if/when I know they have something new I actually would like to see. I'm not paying anyone to watch ads.
The FAANG acronym was invented by a TV host of a stock market show based on their value to stock market grifters, not actual tech they're working on (which is why it has Netflix but no Microsoft).
Yeah but if you always have to spend a lot of time finding something to watch, then that shows up in their analytics as increased engagement. Allowing you to remove garbage would make you spend less time in their app.
If you're actually watching content (a whole movie, a series, etc), the total actual usage of the service easily eclipses any time spent bouncing around the UI?
Isn't it still at least very unaware of them, to force you through such bad UI, even if your search time is 10min compared to 2h movie? If not stupid, then still unaware of significant problems of their product/platform.
Or maybe they're right and that's why piracy is growing rapidly. I share most of their complaints and it's a big part of why I quit paying for subscriptions.
I mean, I read stories about their excellent software teams who optimise the user experience all the time and their analytics are superb etc. Then when I use Netflix (not a lot) I notice that it keeps recommending me movies and shows I just f’ing watched. I have the same thing with YouTube and Prime. Are these devs just really bad or is there some motive here I don’t understand? I am not going to watch anything again that I watched 10 minutes ago… in all of these platforms now I have to use quite elaborate search to find things I didn’t watch but do find interesting, even though there must be millions of those. In my recommended feeds I get crap I either already saw or I would never watch (I watched romantic comedies literally never, so why do I keep them as recommended?).
This seems to be a reocurring pattern to me. The tech giants hire supposedly the best talend on the market for all their six figures, yet their products and platforms perform subpar for mny users. To me it seems, that all their talent is directed into the wrong channels and therefore cannot bring their skills to bear on something that makes an actually great product for those users.
You can have the best engineers and bright minds, but if your product sucks or your ethics are non-existent, and you don't let those engineers act outside of the limitting borders of the product, then they will not be able to make the product shine. They might be able to make a more dystopian version of your product, within the guidelines and ethical framework.
And lets not forget, that ethics of the engineers also play a big role. A decent developer with good ethics might make something, that the best engineers would never have even considered making or releasing to the public.
On your last point: Bundling features together in tiers even if not every user needs everything in every new tier is not new in any digital or even non-digital pricing strategy. Doubly so when the cost to Netflix to "grant" you 4 simultaneous streams is effectively 0.
Ehhhhhh, not sure I buy that. Sure, giving one person 4 streams instead of 1 has very little marginal cost, but giving everyone 4 streams instead of 1 is not cheap. They need more servers to serve the extra traffic, and they still have to pay for data transfer, presumably, even in places where they've put PoPs inside ISP data centers.
(Granted not everyone will be using those 4 simultaneous streams all at once, and some people won't even use the extra streams at all, but I'm sure enough will that it won't be free for Netflix to provide it.)
So if you start looking outside of their interface - why then not just finish and get the movie elsewhere?
Finally, pricing is not flexible, what if I want infrequent 4k UHD streaming on a single device - why do I pay for 4 streams as if I'm streaming 24/7? At this point, I'm better off with Netflix Pay Per View (if this was offered). I keep paying for this service just because I can and just because I might watch something - but I find it more and more frustrating to watch something...