Comment by dpark
8 years ago
> In the short term very few people are going to cancel Netflix because of this, but enough of these decisions in succession is erosive to customer goodwill.
The “auto preview” is so unpleasant that I’ve essentially stopped using Netflix entirely. I’ve no doubt that their testing shows it increases engagement, but I find it so jarring and abrasive that I rarely open the app any more. I’m sure they still have content I want to watch, but I can’t stand the experience of trying to find it.
I would love to have more insight into their A/B engagement metrics. I’m sure they capture if immediate engagement goes up when a feature is enabled, and probably the same over time periods of days or weeks. Do they also capture if total app usage declines 75% over 6 months after a feature is enabled?
I agree. You can't even leave Netflix running on a device and leave the room because it will just start playing something without any actual user input! And it appears none of the apps let you turn this behavior off.
Netflix already seems to have no problem getting people to watch hours and hours of shows as a result of having high quality content. Why do they need to perform cheap tricks like auto-preview to bump up user stats, as others have pointed out, at the expense of user happiness/preference?
That’s funny - I Like the auto preview, in fact I would like them to go further and advertise their content to me, as live TV does. When I watch Netflix at the end of a hard day I’m in lazy consumer mode, I want content to be suggested to me. I hate wading through static dull pictures which give me very few clues as to the content they represent. Netflix are unstoppable - they offer incredible value compared to extortionate SKY, i cancelled their £120 per month package 6 months ago and I have never regretted it.
I'm listening to music or half-watching twitch whilst scrolling through Netflix to decide what I'll watch with supper. It's incredibly frustrating to have them autoplay video content, to the extent that I've started going back to browsing torrent sites instead.
It doesn't help that their website is a laggy piece of shit with miserable discover-ability. But, you know. Ugh.
Surely the video is muted by default, why is that a problem?
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I also like auto preview. But I would never want them to start advertising their shows to me (like Amazon Prime does), that's going too far.
> The “auto preview” is so unpleasant that I’ve essentially stopped using Netflix entirely.
If you find a lower powered device such as the previous generation of Amazon Fire TV, it does not auto-preview or auto-run trailers at the top of the screen - instead you just get a static image of the show.
Now if only I could get it to do that on my PS4 :(
I'm definitely not planning to buy a dedicated crappy device for Netflix, though. :/ I want fewer devices. I've only still got an Xbox One for Blu-Ray/DVD and HBO Now, which inexplicably isn't available for my TV.