
The Netflix Website Gets a Major Upgrade - philip1209
http://blog.netflix.com/2015/06/the-netflix-website-gets-major-upgrade.html
======
brianstorms
What I don't understand is how Netflix seemingly ignores a user's incredibly
valuable feedback regarding a given title. For example, you're browsing all
the titles and you see some stupid animated movie you have no intention of
ever seeing. You select it, to get the detail view, then click "Not
interested" or if that doesn't appear (why I don't know), you click one star.
You're telling Netflix basically, "I don't wanna see this, ever, so please
don't recommend it to me."

But... Netflix keeps recommending it. Come back a day later, it's still there
in the list while you're browsing titles. Spend an hour indicating "Not
Interested" on all the crap and filler (there is a ton) of streaming content
Netflix shows you, and it makes no difference. It's all there the next hour,
the next day, the next week.

I reckon Netflix is afraid the truth would be revealed, that they have VERY
little streaming content, if they honored a user's "Not interested" and hid
those from the genre lists. Why, you might wind up with a handful of titles
listed.

But would that be so bad? I would be perfectly fine if Netflix's lists were
EMPTY today. I would still come back tomorrow to check to see what was new
(gosh, imagine if Netflix sent me a notification of some sort listing out
what's been added since last time I looked).

Today's "Major Upgrade" does not, so far as I know, include these kinds of
improvements. I sure wish it did.

~~~
mixmastamyk
Wish I could whitelist the shows to watch in the kids section, most of it has
little educational value.

~~~
nextw33k
I had to cancel my satellite TV subscription because of the Disney channels.
All the main protagonists are self obsessed trouble makers that never get
their comeuppance.

I would rather run the risk of my kids hearing a youtuber swearing about the
latest minecraft addon than watch my kids grow up with Disney shows. At least
the Youtubers are causing my children to want to create things and then
showing them how.

------
spacko
> When you hover your mouse over a title, you will now see a slideshow of
> images from that movie or show. We hope this slideshow will give you a
> better feel for what the show is about than reading the description alone.

Well, this is a standard feature of any average Joe's porn site for about 5
years now

~~~
wesleytodd
Built this for our site (stream.me) in like a day and a half. Makes you feel
good about your work when big companies with much bigger teams "announce"
features you have already tackled :)

~~~
duaneb
I would imagine it's much harder to roll out at scale.

Netflix's ui has been pretty terrible for a while, though, I wish they would
have an alternative to the grid view. Sometimes I can't find the genre I'm
looking for.

~~~
wesleytodd
Front-end features have nothing to do with "scale". Does it work in the
browsers? That is all that matters.

EDIT: FWIW, we also implemented this feature on our last site which was the
#63 most visited site in the world at its height. So we have done it "at
scale"

~~~
duaneb
Well, you need to find those thumbnails somewhere. So that's an entire backend
component right there.

Also, I seriously doubt you anywhere near approached the scale of netflix's
data centers. #63 most visited site doesn't compete at all with porn or
netflix in terms of sheer bytes.

Just pointing out it's easy to say you can roll something out in a day, but
you can never implement a feature without context.

~~~
wesleytodd
I am certainly not saying have had near the traffic of netflix. But we are a
live stream site, so certainly have to deal with more load for generating the
thumbnail sprites we use because we do them for every new stream, and every
few minutes during the stream

The backend part of it is just ffmpeg, which can do pretty much all of this
for you. The scaling is just a matter of throwing more servers at it, which is
relatively trivial, expensive but simple. Admittedly my 1.5 days was not
including generating the thumbnail sprites. But if you include that we had 2
programmers work on this for a total of less than a week.

~~~
duaneb
> The backend part of it is just ffmpeg, which can do pretty much all of this
> for you.

Really? it takes in a movie and spits your thumbnails, sans spoilers, sans
family un-friendly content, into your data store, already indexed? Across
multiple data centers?

Seems like you're making it out to be much more trivial than it is.

EDIT: To be clear, the feature itself has trivial components. But rolling out
a new feature requires far, far more than just the frontend code and an ffmpeg
script.

~~~
fineman
Those are goalpost-moving requirements. Netflix didn't say anything about
spoilers, etc.

~~~
duaneb
Well among other things, netflix DOES need to ensure that e.g. sex scenes
don't pop up. This is not a legal requirement, but it will drive families that
trusted their kids to not anymore. Additionally, you have to take into account
things like "how to avoid getting terrible shots", which is something I'm sure
porn sites have looked into.

These are goalpoast moving requirements, but I also wasn't the person making
it out to be trivial.

~~~
fineman
They do? I imagine they already have a way to block shows with sex. So if
you're past that and can see the show at all, it seems moot.

Also, all these things are "good ideas", but can you imagine going to your
boss and saying. "I have three-9s of the cases covered, and for the vast
majority we simply refuse to show slides and almost nobody notices ... But ...
I need another six months of tweaking the facial detection to get to four-9s
before we ship it. To make sure nobody seems a funny face when they pause the
video."

Have you considered what the expected revenue differential between the two
systems is (with and without funny-face detection) and have you compared that
to the cost of the time spent in a meeting discussing it, let alone the work
to implement it, and then to the opportunity cost of not doing other stuff?

These comments about potential difficulties are bike-shedding in action.
Nobody has anything to add so they add nothing. I'm sure we could all imagine
cases where there were complex restrictions, and that'd be totally cool if
these was an article about rule-engines. But it's not.

------
vitd
I'm excited to see they're trying new things, and it does look slick.

That said, I just wish they'd get rid of the stupid horizontal scrolling list
of movies. It's just not efficient and it works poorly. They could have use
these same effects in a vertical list or even 2D grid that has normal
button/wheel-controlled scrolling, zooming in when you clicked on a specific
movie. But the 1D horizontal list that you can't scroll normally is really
limiting and makes me avoid the website.

~~~
boken
Me, too.

Until then, under chrome/userContent.css in my Firefox profile folder, I will
keep:

    
    
        @-moz-document domain(netflix.com) {
        
            .slider .agMovieSetSlider {
                position: relative !important;
                width: 100% !important;
            }
        
            .slider {
                overflow: auto !important;
                height: auto !important;
            }
        }
    

_Edit: It strikes me that this may break with the coming redesign. Oh well,
that drawing board 's not such a rough thing to be dragged back to._

------
disposition2
I kind of wish they wouldn't have changed it years ago...I feel like (as with
just about all software 'updates' these days) they continue to remove useful
features (like the ability to actually browse with a modicum of filter
options) in favor of 'curating' results for 'you' and new graphics.

I'll continue to use InstantWatcher and other 3rd party resources when I want
to find something / browse and then back to Netflix when I know exactly the
search term I'm looking for.

~~~
endymi0n
Shameless self-plug: You might like our site at
[https://justwatch.com](https://justwatch.com) \- all the filter options at
your power and it doesn't make dizzy when scrolling :)

~~~
ohitsdom
Netflix and Amazon Prime- nice! Any plans on integrating Rotten Tomatoes
scores?

~~~
endymi0n
Ratings are on the way, less than a month. The non-optimal UX with the country
switcher is due to a significant amount of VPNed users searching for other
countries' content in case you were wondering. Still discussing how to improve
on that.

------
anigbrowl
_Over the past four years, web browsers have changed a lot, becoming more
sophisticated and allowing for richer visuals and animations._

I am used to this eye candy already from using it on the Playstation. but what
I would really like is an ability to curate my own lists (instead of having
just one), things on the stay on my list in the order they were added (pairs
or occasional trilogies always end up 'drifting away' from each other for no
special reason) and to see more information about who made a film than just 3
actors and a director. What if I want to search for films by a particular
screenwriter?

Other missing features: request a film for streaming that's not currently
available, so they have some way to gauge demand; a higher-priced streaming
tier where you have access to the extra features that come on a disc, like
interviews or director commentary; Scene search. Netflix has a massive
incumbent advantage now, and a deservedly earned one, but user-side
development has slowed to a crawl since they went into producing their own
content, and the risk for investors is that the market cares more about user
experience than the output of Netflix's TV studio (although I personally think
their content division is outstanding).

Oh, and _please_ stop ejecting me from the credits of a film to show me what
you think I want to want to watch next. There is nothing more annoying than to
be sitting there in a reflective mood following a great film, thinking about
what I watched as the credits rol and the music plays, only to get kicked out
into a static advert for some other film usually wildly
inappropriate/irrelevant. It's like being woken up when you're still dreaming,
and every time it happens I want to throw something at the television.

~~~
ajanuary
> Other missing features: request a film for streaming that's not currently
> available, so they have some way to gauge demand;

As a UK user, it'd also be nice to be able to somehow monitor when something
that's only available in other territories (i.e. US) becomes available in the
UK.

------
philip1209
It's built using ReactJS, NodeJS, and FalcorJS

Source:
[https://twitter.com/NetflixUIE/status/610506318860783616](https://twitter.com/NetflixUIE/status/610506318860783616)

~~~
smaili
Was this redesign part of that one blog post from Netflix that criticized
ExpressJS? Can't remember off the top of my head when that was posted.

~~~
aquilaFiera
Not really; they were done by different teams.

------
drdoom
I keep hearing praises of Netflix's recommendation engine. I wonder when they
will roll that out! Because when I browse Netflix, I have 5 pages of
categories, each with upto 75 shows. However, and this is the critical point,
each of those categories contains about 60-75% the same shows, presented in
different order. And with no respect to genre, to boot.

------
danso
> _Scrolling through rows is now much faster, with a mouse-click advancing a
> full row at a time._

Jesus. Not only have other competitors had this (Amazon Prime, HBO)...Netflix
itself had this nav "feature" before it moved to the tedious mouseover scroll
it's had for the past couple of years. The slow-scroll was so infuriating that
I thought it _had_ to be the result of some incredibly counter-intuitive A/B
insight. But now that they're reverting, it just seems like a poorly conceived
idea.

------
malloreon
fingers crossed this fixes the netflix recommending me things I've already
rated before.

Heads up netflix: if I've rated something, I don't ever want it to be
recommended again outside of "watch it again."

~~~
mdm_
Another Netflix annoyance: if I watch the pilot episode of a series, then
weeks and months pass, and I never watch another episode of that series, it's
probably safe to infer that I didn't like it and you can stop recommending
stuff to me based on my "interest" in that series. I feel like there's a few
of these really common-sense things that Netflix doesn't pick up on and
probably don't require some fancypants algorithm to detect.

~~~
corin_
Is it possible the fancypants algorithm knows you better than you do, knows
you will like that series if you watched 3 episodes instead of just the pilot,
and is hoping you'll change your mind and listen to it?

~~~
ohitsdom
"I know the first couple episodes suck, but stick with it. You'll thank me
come season 2."

AKA, the "Parks and Rec" effect.

------
walterbell
With the new site, will it be possible to:

    
    
      - deep link to a movie listing
      - deep link to a start time (like YouTube)

~~~
city41
Deep link to listing: yes, as you open up the details view on a title, the URL
updates to reflect that. You can use that URL to go straight to the title, for
example here is Daredevil:
[http://www.netflix.com/browse?jbv=80018294&jbp=2&jbr=1](http://www.netflix.com/browse?jbv=80018294&jbp=2&jbr=1)

~~~
walterbell
The previous site allowed anonymous viewing of a movie listing, for
recommending a movie to a non-subscriber.

The Daredevil movie listing link goes to a login page, is that expected?

------
hfsktr
Can't wait to see it in action. I didn't care much for the site as it was. My
biggest pet peeve was the difference between dvd/streaming interfaces. The DVD
version would let you click to advance but the streaming list would only
advance while hovering.

Second biggest is they don't have, last I saw, an easy way to see if a movie
is now available on streaming when it's on the dvd list.

Maybe I misunderstood how it worked (is there a better way!) but it scrolled
too slow for me. I usually wait a month to see if anything is new because of
how infrequently they get new movies[0].

[0] streaming seems to be almost all tv shows now and they have those getting
on the 'new' list constantly.

On that front...how come FOX/WB/etc don't compete and take those views? Last
time I checked FOX only had the last 5 episodes when I really needed the a
full season to catch up. Making me go somewhere else for their own content
just seems weird.

~~~
duaneb
> On that front...how come FOX/WB/etc don't compete and take those views?

Because it's a lot of work running a dedicated streaming service. Personally,
I wouldn't do that. A better model would be licensing + free views (as they
already do).

------
EugeneOZ
And still no catalogue before purchase.. "We have something interesting, but
will show it only after purchase" \- very cool.

~~~
pfg
Isn't the first month free anyway?

~~~
EugeneOZ
You should give them your payment card credentials first. I know they are big
but it doesn't mean they can't be hacked. And when you submitted card
credentials, only way to remove them is send email to privacy@netflix.com and
wait for reply.

~~~
simoncion
You could do what I do: keep an online-charges-only debit account that
contains just enough cash to cover recurring services and gets on-demand cash
deposits to cover one-off charges.

~~~
Nullabillity
My bank (Swedbank/Sparbanken Nord) forces you to do it like that. They won't
approve online payments on your regular card, instead you have to go to their
website and create a temporary card number with a limited balance and an
expiration date counted in months rather than years.

~~~
jordanthoms
As a customer I prefer the US model: Give your card number to pretty much
everyone, mark off the fraudulent/unwanted transactions on your account each
month, carry on.

~~~
simoncion
Frankly, I don't want the hassle -however small- of having to dispute recorded
charges. I much rather prefer that fraudulent charges be declined for reasons
of insufficient funds. [0]

It might surprise you to learn that I manually instruct my bank to send checks
to my creditors each and every month. Maybe I'm nuts. _shrug_

[0] Yes, I recognize that there's a _potential_ race condition that might
enable a fraudulent txn while denying me the ability to complete one of my own
txns. Not much I can do about it with the tools that my otherwise wonderful
bank gives me. :)

------
saberworks
I wish they would bring back plain text titles under each cover image.
Hovering over each image isn't an adequate solution.

------
mattnguyen
What frontend framework was used? Any lessons learned? I hear Netflix uses
Ember, Angular, and React for different applications. I imagine a wonderful
eng blog post will be posted in the near future :)

------
Someone1234
> With the new Netflix website, we’ve created a richer, more visual
> experience, and a website that works more like an app and less like a series
> of linked web pages. Information appears in-line and in context rather than
> on a separate page, which makes exploring the catalog faster than ever
> before.

Eww.

So now linking something to someone is broken, the back and forward may or may
not work, middle click definitely won't work, and all for what? So they look a
little cooler? Meh.

~~~
ohitsdom
Have you actually tried this, or are you just speculating? I just did, and
linking still works. Looks like they still have separate pages for
movies/shows. But even for single-page sections, I'd assume they are updating
the hash so linking works.

~~~
Someone1234
Hasn't rolled out to my account yet. Per Netflix's blog post they're doing it
in blocks.

I was replying to what Netflix said. Which is all the information I have
available to me until they deploy it to my account.

~~~
ohitsdom
You're assuming they don't have updating URLs. That would be a massive
oversight. Almost all popular SPAs that I use have linking implemented, so I
don't know why you'd assume Netflix would fail to do this.

------
andor
Technically it might be completely rebuilt, but I guess that most people won't
notice. They added more animations and a video element on top, both of which
makes it slower.

As functionality and layout are the same as in the old version (which was
pretty good already), I don't see how this one is "more like an app and less
like a series of linked web pages".

------
ChuckMcM
I'm a bit jaded but it looks like a really great change to focus on what you
can watch versus reminding you that there used to be a movie in this space
that you can no longer watch.

I love Netflix as an instant streaming service, and I really dislike the hoops
that big media makes folks jump through, but after having yet another movie I
recommended to a friend that I had streamed on NetFlix but had disappeared, I
switched back to buying movies on disc that I want to have in my library.

------
mmcru
my question is, do i still have to google some arbitrary and arcane
silverlight hotkey code in order to change video quality?

~~~
dysfunction
I don't understand why the console Netflix apps have the ability to show you
exactly (ish) the quality you're currently streaming at (on PS3, hit 'select'
button and it'll say "720p" or whatever it's at), but the PC browser client
doesn't.

~~~
simoncion
Press ctrl+alt+shift+d . The video resolution will appear, along with a bunch
of other debugging info.

------
neovive
I'm looking forward to a follow-up article from their development and/or ops
team. Netflix tech articles are very interesting. I'm sure there is a good
tech story behind this upgrade.

------
oimaz
The killer part of this redesign is the in-context, in-line information cards
which makes shifting through the netflix's catalog a breeze.

------
delgaudm
Does anyone know why you cannot filter by rating the same way you can by
genre? Is it a hard problem to solve?

~~~
ajmurmann
I honestly wonder if they try to direct users towards certain content because
they might have different deals around the content that makes watching certain
movies for them better than others. That's the only explanation I can come up
with for why they would make finding something worth watching so hard.

------
berns
Unless you're logged in the site is useless. I'm not a client so I can only
comment as a prospective buyer. There isn't much to comment, though. It's a
horrible experience. The help search is also useless. Tried the following
search terms: pricing, plans, movies, guide; the results are always the same,
the first result is always "Can I stream Netflix in Ultra HD?".

------
ams6110
No word on whether any of this will apply for those who use a game console.

~~~
shortstuffsushi
Unless I'm mistaken, this update makes it in line with the consoles. I have an
Xbox One, and it currently looks much like the site does now.

------
nly
You know what would be better? Ditching Silverlight. Fucking thing crashes on
me every few minutes. I've been trying to watch the last 6 minutes of an
episode of HoC for about 30.

~~~
simoncion
I've been using the Netflix "HTML5"[0] player for what seems like at least six
months. Check your playback settings and flip the "Use HTML5 player" switch.

[0] It's actually the EME player, which uses a binary blob for video
decryption. But, The Industry calls this DRM scheme HTML5 video decoding, so
whatever.

~~~
icebraining
They call it HTML5 player because it's using the HTML5 <video> tag and using
native browser controls. Being decoded by an external module isn't determinant
- in fact, Firefox uses the same infrastructure (GMP) for both encrypted and
unencrypted videos.

~~~
simoncion
Oh, I _know_ why it's called what it's called.

Lumping patent and copyright issues under the "Intellectual Property" umbrella
harmed productive non-wonky discussion of the issues. I expect that lumping
DRM'd and unencumbered video playback under the same umbrella will be
similarly damaging to non-wonky discourse.

------
comrade1
I've sort of given up on Netflix but maybe I'll take a look. I mean, I still
pay my monthly fee but I now watch all of my stuff through Plex. I just
subscribe to a show and it appears in my Plex server, with a much better ui
than netflix.

I'm overseas and at first I tried to use the Plex Netflix plugin and connect
to Netflix through a VPN that I would have dynamically open whenever it went
to a range of ip addresses, but Netflix's amazon range kept changing - I
assume to stop people like me from accessing from overseas.

And so I gave up trying to do it 'proper' and now I just download their shows
and watch them from my own server. I live in a country where it's legal to
download - just not share, and I think what I do is completely reasonable.

But I at least still pay my monthly fee.

~~~
bduerst
How do you use plex with your TV?

I set something up with a RPi a while ago, but performance was ridiculous.
Chromecast support from mobile app was also buggy.

~~~
SG-
PlexConnect with an AppleTV here, works pretty well:

[https://blog.plex.tv/2013/06/04/introducing-plexconnect-
an-a...](https://blog.plex.tv/2013/06/04/introducing-plexconnect-an-appletv-
client-which-thinks-different/)

------
chengiz
The Netflix website is a piece of shit. Their recommendation system is crap. I
liked a Robert Redford movie, now even his crap ones show up as five stars.
They have decent movies but it's impossible to find. Their search sucks. Their
foreign category has everything and the kitchen sink. Their scroll gives about
ten movies then is done, even though they have a hundred movies fitting the
title. If they had a good system, you wouldnt need instantwatcher and
whatdoiwatchonnetflix. It's good to know that the major upgrade involves - ooh
I dont have to click anymore, how cool.

