Community Talks! Vol. 1, ep. 22.
The big promise of streaming companies was to move away from cable and give users more flexibility, choice, and a better experience overall. What has actually happened is endless scrolling through 10 different services with every different one having a completely different interface. Consolidation of these companies hasn’t helped with us seemingly inching towards a new and probably more expensive cable alternative.
In Sweden, there are more than 10 fully-fledged streaming services, all with different shows. So, if you want to find something to watch you need to go through them one by one, get confused by the completely different layout of the content, and end up rewatching an old show.
There’s a reason why shows like The Office, Friends, Seinfeld, etc. always have high viewership. Obviously, one reason is they’re really good shows, but I think another reason is that people get tired of endlessly scrolling and just go with something they know.
It seems like the companies producing the content haven’t really realised they are now tech companies also and that the user experience is just as important as the content itself. Some struggle with the most basic things, while others make bad design choices just by trying to be different. Netflix has one of the most user-friendly and stable apps, but it still lacks so many features. If you watch something on another account or at a friend’s place, that show will still show up forever on your suggestions, even though you’ve already seen it.
The main issue is that you have no real choice if you want to watch a specific show. It’s usually only available on one platform, so if you want to watch specific shows you have to get a subscription to each service. One positive thing is that each streaming service has a monthly subscription so you’re not locked in for months or years.
In conclusion to my little rant, streaming services have to get better and compete with each other not just based on content, but user experience as well. We live in a much better time where you can choose what you want to watch whenever you want, but it could still be so much better.
What are your thoughts? What feature do you think would be amazing to have?
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Abigail LefflerIt is a far cry from the times we only had a few TV black-and-white channels to choose from and little choice in respect of what to watch (plus dinosaurs grazing in the backyard).
But how fast we get used to the comfort and slide into complaining mode. I ‘still’ have Netflix and feel sometimes irked by their NRE (Netflix Recommendation Engine, based on algorithms that filter content based on your user profile and viewing habits). I haven’t figured out how to turn off the NRE so that I am more in control of my own searches rather than getting ‘more of the same’-type of recommendations.
I also found out that the Netflix offering is country- or region-based and I do not how to switch that off. From Sweden I get a lot of Nordic films to choose from. When I visited India a couple of years ago and I logged into my Netflix account in the evening, I noticed a lot of Bollywood films in their offering. I was recently in South America and logged into my Netflix account, to find a lot of South American films to choose from, which would not be on the menu from Sweden. What if I wanted to watch Swedish films when visiting India? Or Argentinian films from Sweden?
It may seem paradoxical, but whereas in the past we had no choice and no complaints, at present we have more choice, we have become more demanding and impatient and therefore we tend to complain more!
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Hi Nol Zulfiu!
You have made a good point. Sometimes it's really difficult to know what to watch with too many options. From my experience, I use at least 3 different streaming services, and I'm watching at least 10 shows at the moment. But, as you mention, most of the shows I watch are recommendations from the service or from friends and family. With all the algorithms they use now, it's difficult to escape from the same type of shows and movies. Sometimes I feel like I'm watching the same series or movie (because the storyline is the same as others).
However, I believe there is another problem with the streaming services and it's the fact of making people lazier and less proactive to be curious, creative, and do other activities to entertain themselves. I must admit I have dropped in this, by binge-watching a series in 1-2 days. Nowadays, we are more impatient, less physically active, and definitely bored.
I hope to see in the future, that these streaming services improve the user experience by also inviting them to do more than just keep watching series and movies.
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The last 4:th generation Chrome Cast with Google TV actually concatenates the content from various streaming services in one "dashboard" for you, could perhaps be something for you to look into Nol Zulfiu.
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