I still really like Netflix, but the increased force-feeding of their own content doesn't excite me about the future. I would switch to a competing service if it offered a wider selection of movies, but without any Netflix content. If I found a streaming service that had nearly every movie ever produced, I would pay a much larger subscription fee.
Early images of Netflix.com show how far it has come in 20 years
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Re: Early images of Netflix.com show how far it has come in 20 years
#22I still really like Netflix, but the increased force-feeding of their own content doesn't excite me about the future. I would switch to a competing service if it offered a wider selection of movies, but without any Netflix content. If I found a streaming service that had nearly every movie ever produced, I would pay a much larger subscription fee.
not really their fault either. i’m not sure if they could have done anything different, considering they don’t own all the movies they used to provide
Re: Early images of Netflix.com show how far it has come in 20 years
#23The quality of Netflix's recommendation engine went downhill quickly after their move away from the 1-5 star rating system last March. I put a lot of time into picking the right values for each of the movies I watched and was constantly amazed and how good its recommendations were. Still a happy subscriber, just a little less so.
I don't think their recommendation engine is working any less well; they've just made a higher-level strategic change in what it's trying to recommend. Netflix used to want to give people the "perfect movie for them", expecting that eventually they would run out of perfect movies, and move onto just "pretty well-fit movies", and then run out of those too, and probably unsubscribe at that point. Nowadays, Netflix seem…
i think a simpler explanation is that they believe binge-watching long shows leads to better retention (they’ve said this) and as a result changed their algorithm to prioritize items which people keep watching, not items which people will rate highly.
Netflix basically wants to be a black box where people enter and are entertained for two hours a day forever. mind-expanding or emotionally affecting movies don’t really do that.
Re: Early images of Netflix.com show how far it has come in 20 years
#24Downvote me if you want but I love the massive amounts of text in the early version. For me. The web is better with more text and less whatever else.
It seems somewhat counter-intuitive to go to an on-demand video delivery service and want to see a lot of text though, no? People didn't go to Blockbuster to go read a description of the movie on white note card. I see this mentality a lot on HN and it seems like there's a large population of "get off my lawn" techies who only want the WWW to be text and nothing else, ever. Not trying to criticize your opinion, which…
Bear in mind that in 1999 they could not have done a modern-looking website even if their designers had crystal balls and could see what the web would evolve into. The browsers did not support the fonts and styling, and most people were on dial-up so anything image-heavy would have been unusable.
Re: Early images of Netflix.com show how far it has come in 20 years
#25As an outsider looking in i can't help wonder if it lost something on the way.
The impression i had of Netflix from back when was that it had all this weird and wacky stuff reaching back to the straight-to-VHS rental era.
This because at that time the big studios allowed Netflix to digitize a crapload of their back catalog for a song, because they didn't have the first clue if anyone would have any interest in it at all.
But in recent years the studios have learned, and wants to cut out the middleman. Thus Netflix has moved on to producing their own stuff, while what used to be on Netflix may be on any number of studio services (if said services ever get off the ground, thanks to their paralyzing fear of pirates).
Re: Early images of Netflix.com show how far it has come in 20 years
#26I think everyone here realizes that broken CSS and image links makes it a completely moot comparison.
Re: Early images of Netflix.com show how far it has come in 20 years
#27The quality of Netflix's recommendation engine went downhill quickly after their move away from the 1-5 star rating system last March. I put a lot of time into picking the right values for each of the movies I watched and was constantly amazed and how good its recommendations were. Still a happy subscriber, just a little less so.
1-5 star rating system works out when you have a lot of data; and don't work out at all when you have poor ones. Now, that rating only makes sense given the clustered group of people with similar taste. It's also adds complexity of the clustering said group. Furthermore, I think people generally are not always the best critic. I totally can picture people being precise in their rating getting the most of the the reco…
I don't care about the sloppy ones. All I care about is how well it was working for me.
Re: Early images of Netflix.com show how far it has come in 20 years
#28For the time being, I still use netflix, amazon, and hulu streaming services. If you've ever used the apps for any of those services on roku, apple tv, or a smart tv, you're likely frustrated by how difficult it is to find something relevant to watch. I often think, "Who thought this UI was good?" That thought leads to, "What if the interface is purposely bad?" and "Why doesn't Hulu want me to find anything to watch?"
I don't know how licensing works with these streaming services. I'm beginning to think that because these companies license content from third parties, they have an incentive to discourage people from watching anything. Maybe if you don't watch, then they pay less in licensing fees. The ideal profit scenario is for you to subscribe to Netflix's service, but not consume any content. If you pay Netflix, but never watch anything, they don't have to expend the costs to deliver content to you (licensing and bandwidth). This gives Netflix an incentive to create algorithms that obfuscate content rather than a smart algorithm that suggests relevant content.
Does anyone else get this feeling? Does anyone know if licensing agreements are set up on a pay-per-play basis between studios and netflix?
Re: Early images of Netflix.com show how far it has come in 20 years
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think their recommendation engine is working any less well; they've just made a higher-level strategic change in what it's trying to recommend. Netflix used to want to give people the "perfect movie for them", expecting that eventually they would run out of perfect movies, and move onto just "pretty well-fit movies", and then run out of those too, and probably unsubscribe at that point. Nowadays, Netflix seem…
i think a simpler explanation is that they believe binge-watching long shows leads to better retention (they’ve said this) and as a result changed their algorithm to prioritize items which people keep watching, not items which people will rate highly. Netflix basically wants to be a black box where people enter and are entertained for two hours a day forever. mind-expanding or emotionally affecting movies don’t reall…
I have to second this. I used to watch some really "mindfucked" movies on Netflix. I think I watched The Cube, The Zero Theorem, and Brazil, partly because Netflix had recommended them to me. Now? Those movies don't even show up in the entire recommendation list. In fact, most of what shows up is series I know I won't like. I still subscribe but it's a letdown how the recommendation system incentives have changed.
Re: Early images of Netflix.com show how far it has come in 20 years
#30"Its recommendations, now powered by algorithms, were curated by staffers then. Collections of movies grouped by common themes included Complicated Couples, Serious Spy Action, High-Tech Horrors, and Bad People, Great Movies—precursors to the remarkably specific personalized rows of categories now featured on Netflix. "
I for one pine for the days where I could find an individual with similar sensibilities - or better yet NEW sensibilities that I did not know shared, and follow their curation...rather than having some engineered algorithm suggest music and movies to me.
Thankfully there are many wonderful radio stations and bloggers who still exist. I find SV has done a terrible job replacing them and for that I am grateful.