I have this problem for years. Sometimes I spend so much time 'deciding' what to watch, that it gets too late to watch. While actually anything in the given genre, not longer than XYZ minutes and with rotten tomatoes/imdb rating about X would do. Here you have an idea for a project... Eliminate annoying daily choices. Oh how many times I went to buy trousers, couldn't choose from dozens, went to other store where they have 2-3 styles and about 3-4 colors each and bought in a couple of minutes. And etc.
The DVDs are an extra subscription. If you have basic streaming NetFlix, you easily exhaust the stuff worth watching in a few months, give or take, depending on how much time you spend watching TV.
Thanks for the validation! We're actually out to solve that problem for movies, this is just the start. Should have another product announcement in a week or so.
Give us a few years and we'll get to trousers too.
Although I really only watch on my TV and not my computer, I like the concept and it seems well implemented. Cracking the nut of figuring out what to watch is a tough one, that's for sure. Good luck!
The link says I can't use it because it's a Chrome app, which, as far as I know, is nothing more than a website artificially constrained so that I can't use it on an iPad or any browser that is not Chrome.
This seems worse than Flash websites, what are the advantages for developers or users? They are built using web technologies anyway, why restrict your audience?
It's a browser extension that modifies the netflix page in-browser. There is a difference between Chrome extensions and Chrome apps, extensions run in the background and usually provide an icon with information or modify pages or perform some resident task. The apps are, somewhat as you say, a glorified webpage making use of special chrome APIs [1] to offer functionality that is not possible on regular web pages.
I really wish netflix would let me create 'channels.'
I wish I could pick 5 or 6 television series, group them together, and just hit 'play random.' Netflix then randomly selects an episode from one of the series, then plays it!
If we take your idea and added a mechanism that plays new episodes (from those pre-selected series) at a user-designated primetime showing, I think we would have a winner.
Why can't one of these services just give us our own legit pseudo-channel? (Hulu???) BTW, you can sort-of do this with a combination of XBMC, a few plugins (mainly pseudoTV), Couchpotato, Sickbeard and a good tracker, but it is way too much of a headache to setup and maintain.
I really like the timer concept here. Too often I've found that suggestion services just serve to further choice paralysis. The timer adds a time imperative that overrides my usual action of overanalyzing everything.
I've gotten into a phase recently where I am obsessed with dark BBC comedies I had never heard of like Snuff Box and League of Gentleman. I found them just random-surfing on Netflix.
Its a funny phenomenon where you'll sit through 3 hours of movie+commercials to watch 'Tommy Boy' for the twenty something time on cable but you'd never seek it out on Netflix.
I really think some sort of 'channel' on Netflix where movies just play and you can tune in would catch on. Something about knowing other people are out there watching the same thing..
Why dont you use movies recommendation services. I like http://metataste.com very much.
It may not have good interface, but way better recommendations then netflix.
I built v0 at the TV of Tomorrow Hackathon (http://hack.tvot.tv) in June, v0.1.1 at Disrupt SF Hackathon 2013 in September, and cleaned it up over the last 48 hours instead of sleeping.
