Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Turning Off Autoplaying Previews

help.netflix.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 243 posts

Re: Turning Off Autoplaying Previews

#171

Post by dublinben »

creeble wrote: post #152
philipkglass wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't even mind paying on demand to stream a film. It's annoying and economically baffling when you can't stream a film even if you have your credit card in hand, ready to pay. Last weekend I tried to find To Live and Die in L.A. -- from the 1980s but hardly obscure. I couldn't find it legitimately available to stream anywhere , for any amount of money. I even tried Kanopy, which has been my go-to source for films…

And you sometimes can't even rent movies that you saw on Netflix as recently as a couple of years ago. "Page Eight" was a great little spy movie with Bill Nighy and Rachel Weisz on Netflix. Now you can't rent from anywhere, for any price afaict. How does this optimize revenues for the studios?

This movie may be available through Hoopla in association with your local library.[0] It appears to be distributed in the US by PBS which doesn't have the best streaming availability.

[0] https://www.hoopladigital.com/title/10085700

Re: Turning Off Autoplaying Previews

#172

Post by syshum »

tacticaldev wrote: post #32

Awesome! auto-playing previews has always caused issues on my Roku devices

Have you changed it on your Profile, I did but the RoKu app still autoplays

update: looks like 1 of my 2 Devices is working correctly (not AutoPlay), so here hoping the other starts soon

Re: Turning Off Autoplaying Previews

#173

Post by lowtolerance »

slg wrote: post #158
philipkglass wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Netflix Prize competition launched in 2006, before they had started streaming anything. The problem was to recommend a huge DVD-by-mail catalog to millions of users. By the time the competition finished in 2009, streaming was already growing rapidly. Nowadays their DVD business is a small footnote to their streaming business. The streaming catalog is much smaller than the DVD catalog and the consequences for star…

You are certainly right about Netflix's catalog decreasing, but that doesn't explain why Netflix's recommendations have been downgraded over time. I am reminded of the show Tuca & Bertie. It was a new Netflix original from the same people who created BoJack Horseman. You would think it would be obvious to surface the new show to anyone who watched the old show. Except that never happened. The show's creator even comm…

What I hate about Netflix’s recommendations is how if you watch any standup comedy special, Netflix decides that you’re a huge, undiscerning standup fan and recommends all standup comedy to you, forever.

Re: Turning Off Autoplaying Previews

#174

Post by [deleted] »

slg wrote: post #158
philipkglass wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Netflix Prize competition launched in 2006, before they had started streaming anything. The problem was to recommend a huge DVD-by-mail catalog to millions of users. By the time the competition finished in 2009, streaming was already growing rapidly. Nowadays their DVD business is a small footnote to their streaming business. The streaming catalog is much smaller than the DVD catalog and the consequences for star…

You are certainly right about Netflix's catalog decreasing, but that doesn't explain why Netflix's recommendations have been downgraded over time. I am reminded of the show Tuca & Bertie. It was a new Netflix original from the same people who created BoJack Horseman. You would think it would be obvious to surface the new show to anyone who watched the old show. Except that never happened. The show's creator even comm…

[deleted]

Re: Turning Off Autoplaying Previews

#175

Post by dahfizz »

heleninboodler wrote: post #162
underbluewaters wrote: post #20

It's amazing it took this long. I can understand how some people might be okay with this feature but it causes me actual anxiety to use the Netflix app on my AppleTV. Before autoplay I could mindlessly browse looking for content. Now I hurry through to check if there is anything new and get out as fast as possible. They must know that people use the app less since this change... right?

Yes, agree on the anxiety. My girlfriend makes fun of me because I'll be browsing and while talking to her I habitually move the focus left-right-left-right just to prevent the annoying video from playing. She hates it too. Does anyone like this feature?

I'll give my dissenting opinion:

I do like the feature. If I'm actively looking for something to watch, I like the fact that I can quickly see a preview. They normally don't start playing until I've finished reading the excerpt anyway, so it's not some massive annoyance. By the time the preview starts to play, there is a high probability that I want to see it. And if not, I just continue scrolling. It is the tiniest of inconvenience for an overall improvement to the experience of finding something to watch.

I suspect there is a high correlation between people that hate autoplay and people that hate the open office. Some people find tiny little distractions absolutely unbearable, but I don't.

If I am actively looking for something to watch on TV, why would I be so bothered that a video starts playing on my TV? I don't really understand the use case of someone that wants to leave the Netflix home page up just hovering over a title.

Re: Turning Off Autoplaying Previews

#176

Post by torben-friis »

reaperducer wrote: post #125
jfengel wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Netflix now has much better sources of information than the self-reported star ratings. Self-reported ratings fail in a lot of ways. Users can upvote what they think they're supposed to upvote. They'll downvote something, then go watch the sequel, because "It's terrible but I love it". And since they're seeking out stuff that they suspect they're going to like, they either compress all of the ratings into the top tie…

All current user ratings systems for movies are terrible because new users can bury a great movie. There are classic, important, society-changing movies from the previous century that were highly praised by contemporary critics and won scads of awards. But then people today watch them with zero context or understanding of what was happening or what the world was like and give them bad ratings because they can only co…

FilmAffinity is awesome for that - basically, after you vote a bunch of movies, it finds the N active users that voted most similarly, and then it offers you as recommendation whatever those people vote favorably that you haven't seen yet. You can actually see those selected people and filter them manually too.

The consequence is that you don't care about things like masses of teenage girls upvoting the latest vampire fad, people downvoting a classic because they don't understand the context or anything, because only your bubble matters to you. And if you fear that the bubble will keep you from discovering new things, there's a way to set up the algorithm to calculate your similar users so that they aren't exactly close to you - or you can go to a specific users profile if you know them and see what they're voting.

I find it amazing compared to IMDb or rottentomatoes, but for some reason I think it's mostly unknown outside of the Spanish speaking world.

Re: Turning Off Autoplaying Previews

#177

Post by pfedak »

Carpetsmoker wrote: post #57
2bitencryption wrote: post #4

Didn't ever expect to see this capability. A bit unrelated, but: anyone remember in the "early" days when Netflix held competitions to develop the most accurate recommendation and ratings engines? Giving out million dollar prizes? And held possibly state-of-the-art tech for this? And then one day completely gutted the star rating system, replacing it with a much-despised "thumbs up/down" system, giving up their "so g…

I don't really like star systems because I spend way too much time deciding if something is 3 or 4 stars, or 4 or 5 stars. I much prefer textual descriptions; for example "Terrible", "Don't like", "Okay", "Like", "Favourite", which has the same options as a 5-star rating system, but choosing between 3/4 and 4/5 is much easier IMHO. I don't really know of any system that uses this, except this one music player I wrote…

taste.io does Awful/Meh/Good/Amazing

Re: Turning Off Autoplaying Previews

#178

Post by stubish »

ehsankia wrote: post #61
Carpetsmoker wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really like star systems because I spend way too much time deciding if something is 3 or 4 stars, or 4 or 5 stars. I much prefer textual descriptions; for example "Terrible", "Don't like", "Okay", "Like", "Favourite", which has the same options as a 5-star rating system, but choosing between 3/4 and 4/5 is much easier IMHO. I don't really know of any system that uses this, except this one music player I wrote…

Yep, as much as people hate it, when it comes to recommendation, up/down is all the data you need. Trying to build a system out of a 5 star system just adds unnecessary complexity, and the reality was that people used the star system differently making it even harder. up/down thumb is explicit and cleaner to work with.

I agree that thumbs up/thumbs down is probably better to encode appreciation than a 0-5 scale. But for building a recommendations engine a single bit of information is not enough. If I and everyone else flags shows we are not interested in viewing 'thumbs down', then all shows end up with terrible ratings. Similarly 'thumbs down' for a great movie, but seen it already thanks so stop screaming it at me. Thumbs up and Thumbs down is certainly not all the data you need, as is demonstrated by Netflix as it stands today.

Re: Turning Off Autoplaying Previews

#179

Post by torben-friis »

dahfizz wrote: post #175
heleninboodler wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, agree on the anxiety. My girlfriend makes fun of me because I'll be browsing and while talking to her I habitually move the focus left-right-left-right just to prevent the annoying video from playing. She hates it too. Does anyone like this feature?

I'll give my dissenting opinion: I do like the feature. If I'm actively looking for something to watch, I like the fact that I can quickly see a preview. They normally don't start playing until I've finished reading the excerpt anyway, so it's not some massive annoyance. By the time the preview starts to play, there is a high probability that I want to see it. And if not, I just continue scrolling. It is the tiniest…

It's because some people don't look titles one at a time. If I have in front of me a list of 30 movies, the fact that I have the cursor over one doesn't mean I'm considering that one. I might be thinking about the name of the movie that my coworker mentioned yesterday, deciding whether I want a comedy or an action flick, or discussing with my girlfriend what to see; or simply reading diagonally the list of 30 movies, which for most of them I'll probably know something about without reading a description. Making me force my attention where my cursor is forces me to consider them one by one instead, and not pause to ponder.

Liking to see a preview is fine - and there could be a button for that, so that I could tell the app to show it. But the way it is (was) I don't have the control, it's the UI who decides where my attention should be, and that's wrong.

The best comparison I can make it's an overeager shop attendant asking "can I help you?" When you're looking at a product - except in this case it doesn't matter how many times you tell them you're just looking, they come back 8 seconds later to ask again.

Re: Turning Off Autoplaying Previews

#180

Post by dahfizz »

torben-friis wrote: post #179
dahfizz wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll give my dissenting opinion: I do like the feature. If I'm actively looking for something to watch, I like the fact that I can quickly see a preview. They normally don't start playing until I've finished reading the excerpt anyway, so it's not some massive annoyance. By the time the preview starts to play, there is a high probability that I want to see it. And if not, I just continue scrolling. It is the tiniest…

It's because some people don't look titles one at a time. If I have in front of me a list of 30 movies, the fact that I have the cursor over one doesn't mean I'm considering that one. I might be thinking about the name of the movie that my coworker mentioned yesterday, deciding whether I want a comedy or an action flick, or discussing with my girlfriend what to see; or simply reading diagonally the list of 30 movies,…

It sounds like you are watching on a computer?

I watch on my Roku tv, where there is only a few titles on screen and it makes sense to scroll threw them one by one. Maybe that's the difference?

Post reply on HN