I don't approach Netflix as "I want to see this movie so I go here," so much as "I want to watch something, so I'll pick from here." I'm never lacking a choice to watch, even with fairly specific criteria in mind.
Yeah. My main beef with Netflix is that I'd like to just sort content based on the 5-star rating. I'll rarely want to watch something that is less than a 2.0. And I'll consider just about anything that is 4.5 and above.
Same here. I also want Steam to let me see the average reviews of games that it shows me on the main screen. I only buy games that are "Mostly Positive" and above, and it's very grating to have to click every title to see that information.
At least they now let you view movies by basic category in the embedded clients, as opposed to whichever dynamic lists they decided to promote that day. Baby steps, I guess.
I'm with you that I'd like to sort/filter by rating, though I also recognize that tends to cause a snowball effect where you're either popular early or never watched at all.
My previous flatrate streaming plan had exactly that and just browsing the far end of "order by rating" was more interesting than watching the moderately dated mainstream movies that scored highest. "Might" be a matter of taste i guess ;)
But you can filter Netflix content by rating, at least on desktop. Just select a genre from the top left, and then select "HIGHEST RATED" from the "Sort by" dropdown on the right.
I can indeed get more information from the website. I just want more of that from the Android client, which is where I spend most of my time. I'd also like to read the text reviews sometimes, so it would be nice to at least have a website link from inside the app, even if they don't want to put that directly in the Android client.
I do have a Windows laptop, but I rarely consume content on that these days. Mostly I am watching from my tablet, sometimes from my phone, and just very occasionally from my Blueray player (because the UI is terrible, slow, and buggy).
So many apps seem to lack the basic: Filter by x and Sort by x for all of the obvious criteria. What bastardized yearning for simplicity has led to removing such a simple clear piece of functionality? It's familiar, doesn't add excessive clutter and scales well between power-users and lesser mortals. Why is it increasingly rare?
Only guess I have for Netflix specifically is the fact that they have built clients for every device under the sun. This was and still is part of their M.O. It is just time consuming and difficult to write a heavier feature set in to all of your clients when theyre on every smart tv ever, Xbox, probably toasters, God knows what else
Content filters are ridiculously easy to implement though. As long as you already have the browsing view, all you need to add is a picker that changes whatever DB query you are using to select the data.
Like in SQL all you would need to do is change this:
SELECT * FROM movies
to this:
SELECT * FROM movies ORDER BY rating ASC
When I built a web app for film management, that was by far the easiest thing to implement.
Yeah. My main beef with Netflix is that I'd like to just sort content based on the 5-star rating. I'll rarely want to watch something that is less than a 2.0. And I'll consider just about anything that is 4.5 and above.