I know a lot of work goes into content delivery and content production, and no doubt both are extremely important to the Netflix service, but what are some user facing product innovations in the works at Netflix? It seems once you have a video player with some nice transport controls, thumbnail preview scrolling, subtitles, and post roll there’s not much else to layer on top to innovate the UX? The non-playback UX also seems pretty well figured out, a grid of titles that can be selected, infinite scrolling, and search. So what else can be done to shake up the product? Or is that even something Netflix cares about? More specifically, what are some recent and noteworthy features added to the Netflix product? Have all the interesting problems been solved? Is the remaining work KTLO and device support? #netflix
The Engineering Blog is a good reference. Some user facing challenges that are semi-public: - Internationalization (making the layouts for all devices across languages) - Video Encoding. Next big expansion areas are 3rd world countries where primary internet connection is over a (slow) mobile connection. So encoding videos to be efficient - There is a beta with a version that mimics a TV channel - App Personalization. Currently there is too much content for a user to choose from and so UX updates to make this more streamlined
The TV channel experience sounds novel. I can see both a user benefit for indecisive viewers as well as a benefit to Netflix— being able to predict what plays next for a user is great for warming caches before playback. Internationalization, efficient video encoding, and app personalization sound a bit blah in terms of innovation. I know those are all important but users will take them for granted. Thank you for sharing! I’ll check out the tech blog. Video UX has always been a passion for me, but there just doesn’t seem to be a lot of innovation in the space these days.
Recommendation algorithm will always be a big one, and it will never be perfect.
You should checkout their engineering blog. I have found some really interesting work mentioned on it. I think most of their work is focussed on increasing the resilience of their systems