Comment by madrox
7 months ago
Well done. My team built this at Disney six years ago when we were trying to solve content discovery problems. The problem with endless carousels of thumbnails is that it really doesn't draw you in. Sometimes you just need to drop people into content like it's channel surfing.
Netflix tried something similar a few years ago, but in my opinion it missed a critical ingredient, which was dropping people into the middle of content at a compelling point.
Really like the execution here. YouTube take note.
Part of the issue with endless carousels of thumbnails now is that the thumbnails are almost invariable clickbait now. What will I actually get? I have no idea. Even YouTube channels I genuinely enjoy use thumbnails which are entirely different from the actual content. I suppose sensationalism has taken over.
You can't blame creators for playing the game. All they have is that thumbnail to market their content.
No, I don't blame them at all. I make the odd YouTube video and the choice not to use these thumbnails is essentially a choice to stay irrelevant. Not to say sensational thumb nails would help; I make boring videos. But even if they were meant to be more interesting, that choice would clearly be self-sabotaging.
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I think the user intent matters. When I go to Netflix to choose what I want to watch the last thing I want is to be dropped into the middle of random content. I hate auto playing videos when I'm trying to decide if I even want to watch this.
On the other hand when I go to tiktok I get thrown into a random content at every finger flick and I'm delighted because that's exactly why I went there.
If Netflix had well personalized mini tiktok mode serving interesting scenes from the movies you can watch there it could do wonderfully.
Interesting movie scenes is entire genre of tiktok videos. Another movie related genre is narrated summaries of weird movies. This requires bit of work to prepare but still could do well.
Can you give any insight into why these projects were canceled at Disney or Netflix?
I can't speak to Netflix. At Disney the willingness to experiment with streaming UX was thin on the ground six years ago. It was about making something that felt like a direct Netflix competitor. Other experiments have shipped since then, like co-viewing.
I actually believe TikTok is more of the spiritual inheritor of this kind of project more than any other platform.
I guess what I am trying to ask is why was UX research "thin on the ground" (lovely expression, never heard it before). Was it a profit loss thing or more like the progress wasn't fast enough
TikToks has a bunch of channels playing juicy clips from random movies and shows. always have to pop into hashtag or comments to find out what. Maybe they got axe, I don't see them in my feed anymore, but more than a few times I wished there was one click to keep watching optinos. There's always short form video that gets people side tracked, why not side track into an episode of a show.
This Netflix feature drives me crazy. Now I always mute my TV when browsing Netflix because as you highlight items they play and it is super annoying.
could that be solved by finding and using the 'most replayed' mark timestamps for each video and using that to find the best start points for each video
Depends on the content and how it tends to be consumed. That might work for YouTube but maybe not, say, Netflix or services that stream movies.
We did a mix of human curation and random selection, noting which random selections were successful and which were not. It was effective enough. The thing about an experience like this is that it doesn't need to be perfect. Like channel surfing, if it doesn't catch you then just switch the channel.
Uhm, only if this mark doesn't get affect by it being streamed here or it was be less relevant later.