It's designed to make you watch something now and does make it harder to explore something, read reviews, and so on, or just add it to your queue than it used to.
Kind of a trend I detect with "let's overhaul what's not broken and try to streamline it and make it shiny" when it makes the overall experience somewhat worse.
Someone really wanted to push the "watch what we already have on the front page from your browser" thing, it seems.
Here I was thinking the opposite, because their web interface seems pretty lackluster too.