>But at the same time, a large portion of their business model is devoted to making sure that nobody can tell just how little content they have to offer.
You nailed it.
Netflix is the best thing out there for legal streaming TV and movie content; it's that "legal" part which makes things complicated. Objectively speaking, Netflix clones that pop up but have no qualms about distributing pirated content provide a much better experience for users, because just about everything they want to watch is a click away.
In fact, Netflix's entire UI was designed with this in mind. All the "main" views try to give the impression that there is a lot of content, yet the search functionality is not very visible or easy to find and takes 2 steps to actually use. This seems to be a rule that applies to many applications: when your home page is just a search bar, that often means 80% or more of what the majority of users want is available. When your home page is a directory, or just a flattened spattering of content, you know that user's options are constrained.
Netflix is trying to push customers to use their application as more of a feature listing rather than mislead them into thinking it's a universal "watch whatever you want", because they know people will be disappointed if they think it's the latter (and I would assume A/B testing and metrics have demonstrated this to them empirically). So they go with a model of "here's a bunch of stuff you can choose from, you may not have heard of this show but it's good!" instead of "your own personal streaming media hub".
Obviously one can't fault them for this, since they have to rely on B2B relationships that don't always necessarily provide an excellent value proposition for the partner business and/or are very expensive for Netflix, and they have to obey the law. I'm also hoping they can work out more contracts with more studios.
You nailed it.
Netflix is the best thing out there for legal streaming TV and movie content; it's that "legal" part which makes things complicated. Objectively speaking, Netflix clones that pop up but have no qualms about distributing pirated content provide a much better experience for users, because just about everything they want to watch is a click away.
In fact, Netflix's entire UI was designed with this in mind. All the "main" views try to give the impression that there is a lot of content, yet the search functionality is not very visible or easy to find and takes 2 steps to actually use. This seems to be a rule that applies to many applications: when your home page is just a search bar, that often means 80% or more of what the majority of users want is available. When your home page is a directory, or just a flattened spattering of content, you know that user's options are constrained.
Netflix is trying to push customers to use their application as more of a feature listing rather than mislead them into thinking it's a universal "watch whatever you want", because they know people will be disappointed if they think it's the latter (and I would assume A/B testing and metrics have demonstrated this to them empirically). So they go with a model of "here's a bunch of stuff you can choose from, you may not have heard of this show but it's good!" instead of "your own personal streaming media hub".
Obviously one can't fault them for this, since they have to rely on B2B relationships that don't always necessarily provide an excellent value proposition for the partner business and/or are very expensive for Netflix, and they have to obey the law. I'm also hoping they can work out more contracts with more studios.