No Success Among Excess - The Banal of Discovery
Finding what to watch on Netflix is to experience ennui for $15.49 a month.
But it’s not just Netflix; discovering content across streamers is the most common user problem while being the least exciting. Using this moment of exploration as an opportunity to build excitement was a feature of the 90s theater lobby that streamers somehow forgot about as they vacuumed up the patrons.
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Yes, Netflix/MAX/Disney+/Hulu/Tubi/Amazon show you highly (overly?) targeted media to watch, but it's seen in a utilitarian list-of-list style, to the point that it feels like you’re inside a spreadsheet rather than a place to be entertained. The digital theater lobby that is “browse” should be a place that actively answers “What should I watch?” while reaching to create “Ooh, that looks fun for next time!” moments.
Instead, we go into endlessly scrolling, our selection often an act of resignation rather than enthusiasm.
Don’t believe me? Look at the uniformity of Netflix/Disney/Paramount.
List-of-lists. Sameness with no effort to direct the user’s attention to a specific theme. Yes, each item is an individual film/show, but in the presentation they blur together. And other than the Netflix logo in one of the screenshots, can you really tell the apps apart?
One of the few streamers that tries to break out of this approach is MAX, delivering playful/meaningful visual interstitials. This respite from lists-of-lists is the closest thing we have to mimicking the theater lobby experience of old and genuinely feels different.
Look at those images again. I’ll wait.
The theme of the recommended entertainment registers almost immediately — the delicious fun that is Wonka and others, the color of queer entertainers, the gilded TCM classics, and the reverence given to Asian & Pacific voices. THESE SAY SOMETHING. An experience exists.
Not to say that Netflix and others are completely overlooking this need. Netflix now offers “New & Hot,” but even then MAX does it better, delivering a visual flair that makes you immediately experience the film’s mood before even seeing it.
And yes, this is a hard problem to solve. Streamers have a lot of content to show you. It's a bit like being at a restaurant buffet — the idea of choice is fantastic (who doesn’t mind stuffing their face with shrimp?), but your plate will never look like something prepared by Thomas Keller. And do you really need that much iodine?
But unlike a real-world buffet, delicious menu items are available as entertainment across streaming platforms. It’s just that the presentation is so blah. The flair for attention is lost in trying to make everything equally fight for your retinas. But it doesn’t have to be this way, especially when the problem of online lollygagging has been solved by years of iteration in apps well beyond entertainment.
In an odd juxtaposition, discovery on Amazon.com is more engaging and informationally deep than browsing Amazon Prime Video. Even when searching the banal category of “flashlights” on Amazon, I get depth via detail: video, reviews, data points, quick/actionable filtering, and even the colorful call to action via “add to cart” — all things that make me feel informed and give me confidence in my choice. In contrast, when searching Amazon Prime Video, I get a bunch of movie titles and hard-to-see semi-opaque teaser images with play buttons overlayed. Ew.
In the heyday of the movie theater, everything leading up to the film was the excitement — the lobby, the choice of snacks, the quick succession of trailers… At times, the experience was so exciting that it even made up for a blah choice of film. Today, we visit the theater on our sofa. And though the snacks are better and we can always watch something else if our first choice sucks, the experience of selecting is underwhelming to the point of anxiety and lowered expectations.
When were you last excited about of looking for something on Netflix or Hulu?
Bring us back to the theater lobby and away from list-of-lists. Yes, the want for something beyond utility is probably one of nostalgia and the real world doesn’t always translate into digital, but wants can also have truth.
At the least, check out what MAX is doing.
