Dear Netflix, you must have a reason...
Mar. 17th, 2013 10:53 pm![[personal profile]](http://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
abqdanBut I can't imagine what it is.
We watch a lot of streamed content from Hulu and Netflix. Over the past year, both services have changed their streaming systems so that when one program finishes, another immediately starts streaming ('autoplay' on Hulu, 'post-play' on Netflix). On Netflix, it's the next program in a series; on Hulu, the next one in your queue.
I suspect someone told them they needed to be more like cable, where one show automatically follows another; but as far as I'm concerned, one of the benefits of streaming is that you just see what you want to watch right now. It is a benefit (to me at least) to be able to pick and choose the shows I want to watch, without additional episodes or programs automatically starting to play. To cancel this 'post-play' feature you get 15 seconds at the end of a show to cancel the next episode. Particularly annoying when you fall asleep in your chair or bed, and wake up to find you are a couple of episodes further along than you expected!
Thankfully, the engineers at Hulu at least had the sense to bury an on/off switch in the user preferences; Netflix didn't, and according to the support person I just spoke with, have no plans to do so.
Another piece of UI engineering where need and operation were never discussed with customers!
We watch a lot of streamed content from Hulu and Netflix. Over the past year, both services have changed their streaming systems so that when one program finishes, another immediately starts streaming ('autoplay' on Hulu, 'post-play' on Netflix). On Netflix, it's the next program in a series; on Hulu, the next one in your queue.
I suspect someone told them they needed to be more like cable, where one show automatically follows another; but as far as I'm concerned, one of the benefits of streaming is that you just see what you want to watch right now. It is a benefit (to me at least) to be able to pick and choose the shows I want to watch, without additional episodes or programs automatically starting to play. To cancel this 'post-play' feature you get 15 seconds at the end of a show to cancel the next episode. Particularly annoying when you fall asleep in your chair or bed, and wake up to find you are a couple of episodes further along than you expected!
Thankfully, the engineers at Hulu at least had the sense to bury an on/off switch in the user preferences; Netflix didn't, and according to the support person I just spoke with, have no plans to do so.
Another piece of UI engineering where need and operation were never discussed with customers!
