How To Make Netflix Not Suck So Bad

Forever now I’ve been annoyed at Netflix and they’re lack of options to make it a better experience. Besides adding better movies and shows, they could do a lot more to make their product better and more user-friendly.

Here are some things I would change about the experience:

• Have An Option To Not Auto-play Trailers – The trailers that automatically play when you’re just scrolling through titles is very annoying. I wish that there was an option to turn that off. The trailers are often loud and distracting when you’re trying to skim through titles. I find myself going through titles a lot faster because I don’t want the trailers to auto-play. If they had an option to not play the trailers upon “hover” that would be for the best. Or maybe a time limit? Like after 30 seconds of “hover”, play the trailer.
• Have A Timer For When It Exits – It seems if I pause and walk away for a few minutes, the show goes away and I have to click a bunch of times just to get back into it. It would be nice if they had an option to set when Netflix exits the show or goes to sleep (turn off) all together.
• Have A Timer For When Netflix Asks If You’re Still Watching – After a few hours of automatically playing the next episode, it would be nice if you could just customize this time. Some people will play Netflix to go to sleep. It would be good to have that be a custom thing so that it will prompt after an hour or whatever the user decides.
• Have A Timer For Auto-play Next Episode – In my opinion, it plays the next episode really fast. Sometimes I don’t even have enough time to find the remote before the next episode starts playing. A lot of times I may not want to watch the next episode but then I’m stuck with having watched a few seconds, if not more, of the next one. The user should have control over the time.

I think adding some more customization to Netflix would make it a better, less annoying product. All of these changes would not take long to code. Assuming Netflix has a config file per user or per account, I could probably code these changes in a day or less. Seriously. This shouldn’t be that hard. Tiny things would make Netflix work better and be a better user experience. And, come on, what else are they gonna do with all that money they keep charging us?