The problem with netflix

TLDR: Movie discovery sucks.

It often takes me a long time to find a suitable movie and I think there is no solution on the market today.

I think it needs to be solved in three ways:

– By deeply understanding you – taking a quiz or a load of data to recommend similar ones

– Recommend movies based on similar people to you / your social network and friends

– The search results for movies needs to change – we are still using movie posters which were created in 1890. Just have a look at the images below. If it’s your first time looking at the poster, do you have enough information to evaluate if it’s worth watching or not?

How about showing more relevant info from the movie to help you decide which one to watch?

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I previously signed up to Netflix, Disney+, and have now cancelled my subscription. I just don’t think they are good platforms because it is really inefficient to find a suitable movie to watch.

I have frequently spent about 10-20 minutes looking for a movie and then just resort to asking a friend to find a suitable movie.

I am really surprised that this problem hasn’t been properly solved by these companies that are receiving so much income and are investing so many resources into R&D and customer experience.

I also think its an interesting problem to explore because discovery is such an important problem that I am trying to understand better for my company China Admissions.

For Netflix and Disney+

I think the reason the discovery doesn’t work is
1) They don’t have suitable content for me, or
2) Their discovery experience is lacking.

I think they do lack decent content.

But I just think their recommendation experience is awful. They only show a thumbnail of the movie, and I find myself searching through IMDB or the internet to check if it is any good. Most of the content is not that good. They don’t have an efficient rating system and I don’t want to waste my time to watch something that is not good.

The Problem with Movie Rating Reviews

I think Amazon has the best movie discovery experience just because you can see the IMDB score which is fairly helpful. However, I do find that IMDB is more skewed towards certain type of movies. I am not the kind of person to rate movies on IMDB and I don’t find myself agreeing with a lot of the reviews.

There are some reviews that are universally agreed on as a certain score, but there are some movies that have split ratings. The secret is one such example. Some people really like it, some really dislike it. The average score of IMDB of 5.6 does not reflect the true rating results of the movie.

There are many people who would be benefiting from the movie but are put off by the low rating.

I think these reviews are more of a measure of how the movie met their expectations rather than the quality of the movie.

Sci-fi seems to be under-rated, and the tv series seem to be over rated. It might be because people stumble upon sci fi movies and then they are disappointed. People who invest their time into a tv series must do so because they like it.

One of the main problems with movie rating reviews and giving a score is that it is subjective. It’s great because its simple but it might be interesting to explore rating a movie on a larger set of values that are more objective rather than a personal review.

What do people enjoy in a movie? It might be better to do a personality / demographic test of the rater first so that the ratings can be personalised to each person. This could be based on age bracket, income, gender, Myers Briggs personality test.

However, an ideal movie discovery experience doesn’t need to involve ratings.

The Results of Movie Results

The movie results normally consists of:
– Title, Thumbnail, IMDB rating, Genre, Year, Number of Ratings.

What would a perfect movie discovery system look like?

There is almost unlimited content on the internet – so what would a perfect movie discovery system look like?

Maybe such a platform should be independent of the movie platforms which owns the content, and then integrated into those platforms. That would mean there are no limits to the content that can be suggested.

My ideal experience would be:

My expectation would be that the platform deeply understands me and what I like. I would expect it to have a way to learn more about me through a personality test, asking me info about what I like in movies, and which ones I liked before.
It would then use a lot of data to predict which movies I like based on what people who are similar to me like. It looks at which movies I liked before, my personality data, age bracket, income, location etc.,
It could be connected to my friends and my social network. I often find that movies recommended by friends are better than by the internet. It could suggest

I’m really surprised that I haven’t been able to find such a platform until now.

What would a perfect movie result look like?

I don’t think that movie posters should be such a prominent feature of movie results. The movie poster was created 100+ years ago in 1890 when there were only 3-4 choices in movie theatres, and each movie had loads of additional marketing. At that point it was quite easy to make a choice and not that many options.

Now in 2021 we have unlimited choices and we are still using the damn movie poster.

The main problem with movie posters is that it just doesn’t provide enough information and each poster is unique which means that it’s impossible to compare movies between each other.

A movie has so much information in it, it’s an experience. It should have a lot more information in the search results so you can understand it much better and it shouldn’t be so simplified.

How about showing movie results like this?

(I forgot to include the name of the movie).

It still has the poster, but then it has 3-4 different shots of the movie so you can get an idea what happens in the movie. Then you can see the breakdown of reviews.

I still think the review part can be improved. The secret is kind of polarising. There are some people who really like the secret some people who don’t really like the movie. Which kinds of people like it and which don’t? Maybe the reviews can be personalised based on similar people like this: