10 ms·

Early images of Netflix.com show how far it has come in 20 years

49 points by prostoalex 9y ago

digi_owl 9y ago
As an outsider looking in i can't help wonder if it lost something on the way. The impression i had of Netflix from back when was that it had all this weird and wacky stuff reaching back to the straight-to-VHS rental era. This because at that time the big studios allowed Netflix to digitize a crapload of their back catalog for a song, because they didn't have the first clue if anyone would have any interest in it at all. But in recent years the studios have learned, and wants to cut out the middleman. Thus Netflix has moved on to producing their own stuff, while what used to be on Netflix may be on any number of studio services (if said services ever get off the ground, thanks to their paralyzing fear of pirates).
anonytrary 9y ago
I think everyone here realizes that broken CSS and image links makes it a completely moot comparison.
frogfuzion 9y ago
Downvote me if you want but I love the massive amounts of text in the early version. For me. The web is better with more text and less whatever else.
- oblio 9y ago
  For you and for other tech-heads like us, possibly. For the public at large? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_illiteracy#Prevalence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_illiteracy#Prevalen...
  - rocky1138 9y ago
    That link scares the hell out of me. More alarm bells should be ringing about this issue.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - always_good 9y ago
    More likely is that Netflix realized most people, including myself, aren't on Netflix to consume text content. In fact, the text is more likely to spoil the show. "A space freighter has to take refuge on a desolate planet. Little does its crew know that their temporary shelter is infested with horrific parasites. But you do!" I might as well be picking my next viewing from a selection of pictures and illustrations. It's just television.
  - ken 9y ago
    I find this list fascinating, because it seems counterintuitive. I expected to find generally lower illiteracy in countries with simpler/fewer languages, but Romance languages (Italian, Spanish) top the list, while countries with multiple official languages (Switzerland, Canada) are in the middle, and at the bottom are countries with multiple languages and which are generally thought to be difficult to learn (Danish, Finnish). That seems almost backwards. What I get from this is that when it comes to success in language learning, technical difficulty is mere rounding error compared to other factors.
- crysin 9y ago
  It seems somewhat counter-intuitive to go to an on-demand video delivery service and want to see a lot of text though, no? People didn't go to Blockbuster to go read a description of the movie on white note card. I see this mentality a lot on HN and it seems like there's a large population of "get off my lawn" techies who only want the WWW to be text and nothing else, ever. Not trying to criticize your opinion, which I know I probably am, but I just find that is a very vocal and common trend on here. Maybe me having grown up mostly with Web 2.0 and on I just have a different set of expectations of what the WWW can provide me.
  - ams6110 9y ago
    Bear in mind that in 1999 they could not have done a modern-looking website even if their designers had crystal balls and could see what the web would evolve into. The browsers did not support the fonts and styling, and most people were on dial-up so anything image-heavy would have been unusable.
  - pjmlp 9y ago
    What else can you expect from techies that insist using their computers as a PDP-11 replica as if Xerox PARC never existed?
dooglius 9y ago
They couldn't be bothered to find a screenshot with working images? https://www.google.com/search?q=netflix+original+web+page&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=netflix+original+web+page&tb...
- jere 9y ago
  Of course it's going to look awful with broken images. What a weird article.
ajmurmann 9y ago
The article lists that hand curated selections have been replaced by algorithmic recommendations, pointers to DVD sales on Amazon are gone, columns are gone. None of these things sound like a plus to me. Especially given how their algorithms seem to optimize for something (me spending time searching? watching particular movies that clearly aren't a match but Netflix has done incentive for me to watch? No clue) that's not me easily finding the best matching movie. Their interface at least on PS4 also makes it annoying to just read a description of a movie without anything starting to play. Their ratings seem all inflated and useless. I have to go to IMDb or rotten tomatoes to get useful ratings. The best interface for Netflix I've ever had was a Ruby script that used their API to give me a list of movies ranked by their prediction of how much I'd like them. The startling thing was that when that still worked their own interface showed me movies they predicted I'd dislike and didn't show me movies that they thought I'd love. Since the API is gone I can't confirm this anymore but it certainly feels like it. Edit: way back they even used to have a page that was in essence a table of movies that was sortable by rating. That was so useful. Unimaginable today! Edit 2: I'd love it if someone knew and could explain what the Netflix UI is actually optimizing for. I can't believe that it's that they cannot do better. Are they trying to hide lack of content? Are there different money implications of I watch movie A instead of movie B?
- ams6110 9y ago
  I think it's lack of content. Or lack of good content more specifically. From my perception about 20% of the titles on Netflix are in any way worth watching. The other 80% are just there taking up space in the listings to make it look like I have a lot of choices. I rarely watch anything on Netflix anymore because I feel like I've watched what's worth watching. I check it occasionally to see if there's something new, but I mostly keep the subscription because it's a family deal and others in the household still find some value in it.
- pjmlp 9y ago
  I also hate it. It is almost impossible to find the foreign movies I care about. Sometimes I find them by language, other times by the name, and worse just scrolling hoping that they get suggested again to me.
rocky1138 9y ago
The quality of Netflix's recommendation engine went downhill quickly after their move away from the 1-5 star rating system last March. I put a lot of time into picking the right values for each of the movies I watched and was constantly amazed and how good its recommendations were. Still a happy subscriber, just a little less so.
- closed 9y ago
  I personally liked star ratings more, but can see why they'd make the switch. Average star rating is basically a 1 dimensional model, but now what they're doing is communicating a prediction: how much will so-and-so enjoy this show. A show can still have a lower match for all people (similar to having fewer stars). But I think I still like the (assumed) transparency of stars better.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- derefr 9y ago
  I don't think their recommendation engine is working any less well; they've just made a higher-level strategic change in what it's trying to recommend. Netflix used to want to give people the "perfect movie for them", expecting that eventually they would run out of perfect movies, and move onto just "pretty well-fit movies", and then run out of those too, and probably unsubscribe at that point. Nowadays, Netflix seem to want to keep people subscribing by making them feel like they have a chance of finding the "perfect movie for them", but only after Netflix has recommended a bunch of those "pretty well-fit" and even some "not-so-well-fit" movies. This is "better" (from Netflix's perspective) for two reasons: 1. it gives people the impression that Netflix's library still has plenty of "perfect" movies to offer them (by stretching them out); 2. it gives variable-scheduled rewards, rather than constant rewards, making people more addicted. I'm betting the new algorithm works much better at keeping people subscribed, despite seeming to work worse. Netflix is a very data-driven company, and wouldn't have switched to an algorithm that could be observed to hurt.
  - paxys 9y ago
yosito 9y ago
Holy hell! Netflix has been around for 20 years?!
bkraz 9y ago
I still really like Netflix, but the increased force-feeding of their own content doesn't excite me about the future. I would switch to a competing service if it offered a wider selection of movies, but without any Netflix content. If I found a streaming service that had nearly every movie ever produced, I would pay a much larger subscription fee.
- hsljekskfh 9y ago
  not really their fault either. i’m not sure if they could have done anything different, considering they don’t own all the movies they used to provide
surfingtheweb 9y ago
For the time being, I still use netflix, amazon, and hulu streaming services. If you've ever used the apps for any of those services on roku, apple tv, or a smart tv, you're likely frustrated by how difficult it is to find something relevant to watch. I often think, "Who thought this UI was good?" That thought leads to, "What if the interface is purposely bad?" and "Why doesn't Hulu want me to find anything to watch?" I don't know how licensing works with these streaming services. I'm beginning to think that because these companies license content from third parties, they have an incentive to discourage people from watching anything. Maybe if you don't watch, then they pay less in licensing fees. The ideal profit scenario is for you to subscribe to Netflix's service, but not consume any content. If you pay Netflix, but never watch anything, they don't have to expend the costs to deliver content to you (licensing and bandwidth). This gives Netflix an incentive to create algorithms that obfuscate content rather than a smart algorithm that suggests relevant content. Does anyone else get this feeling? Does anyone know if licensing agreements are set up on a pay-per-play basis between studios and netflix?
tjr225 9y ago
"Its recommendations, now powered by algorithms, were curated by staffers then. Collections of movies grouped by common themes included Complicated Couples, Serious Spy Action, High-Tech Horrors, and Bad People, Great Movies—precursors to the remarkably specific personalized rows of categories now featured on Netflix. " I for one pine for the days where I could find an individual with similar sensibilities - or better yet NEW sensibilities that I did not know shared, and follow their curation...rather than having some engineered algorithm suggest music and movies to me. Thankfully there are many wonderful radio stations and bloggers who still exist. I find SV has done a terrible job replacing them and for that I am grateful.
mproud 9y ago
“Hey, look at this page from the Internet Archive! ERMAGHERD lulz!”
monster_group 9y ago
Netflix recommendations are so bad they are downright comical and make me laugh every day. I can't believe their developers get paid 300K+. For that kind of salary and the work they put out, they have got to be the world's most unproductive employees.

49 points by prostoalex 9y ago

As an outsider looking in i can't help wonder if it lost something on the way. The impression i had of Netflix from back when was that it had all this weird and wacky stuff reaching back to the straight-to-VHS rental era. This because at that time the big studios allowed Netflix to digitize a crapload of their back catalog for a song, because they didn't have the first clue if anyone would have any interest in it at all. But in recent years the studios have learned, and wants to cut out the middleman. Thus Netflix has moved on to producing their own stuff, while what used to be on Netflix may be on any number of studio services (if said services ever get off the ground, thanks to their paralyzing fear of pirates).

anonytrary 9y ago

I think everyone here realizes that broken CSS and image links makes it a completely moot comparison.

frogfuzion 9y ago

Downvote me if you want but I love the massive amounts of text in the early version. For me. The web is better with more text and less whatever else.

oblio 9y ago
For you and for other tech-heads like us, possibly. For the public at large? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_illiteracy#Prevalence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_illiteracy#Prevalen...
- rocky1138 9y ago
  That link scares the hell out of me. More alarm bells should be ringing about this issue.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- always_good 9y ago
  More likely is that Netflix realized most people, including myself, aren't on Netflix to consume text content. In fact, the text is more likely to spoil the show. "A space freighter has to take refuge on a desolate planet. Little does its crew know that their temporary shelter is infested with horrific parasites. But you do!" I might as well be picking my next viewing from a selection of pictures and illustrations. It's just television.
- ken 9y ago
  I find this list fascinating, because it seems counterintuitive. I expected to find generally lower illiteracy in countries with simpler/fewer languages, but Romance languages (Italian, Spanish) top the list, while countries with multiple official languages (Switzerland, Canada) are in the middle, and at the bottom are countries with multiple languages and which are generally thought to be difficult to learn (Danish, Finnish). That seems almost backwards. What I get from this is that when it comes to success in language learning, technical difficulty is mere rounding error compared to other factors.
crysin 9y ago
It seems somewhat counter-intuitive to go to an on-demand video delivery service and want to see a lot of text though, no? People didn't go to Blockbuster to go read a description of the movie on white note card. I see this mentality a lot on HN and it seems like there's a large population of "get off my lawn" techies who only want the WWW to be text and nothing else, ever. Not trying to criticize your opinion, which I know I probably am, but I just find that is a very vocal and common trend on here. Maybe me having grown up mostly with Web 2.0 and on I just have a different set of expectations of what the WWW can provide me.
- ams6110 9y ago
  Bear in mind that in 1999 they could not have done a modern-looking website even if their designers had crystal balls and could see what the web would evolve into. The browsers did not support the fonts and styling, and most people were on dial-up so anything image-heavy would have been unusable.
- pjmlp 9y ago
  What else can you expect from techies that insist using their computers as a PDP-11 replica as if Xerox PARC never existed?

dooglius 9y ago

They couldn't be bothered to find a screenshot with working images? https://www.google.com/search?q=netflix+original+web+page&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=netflix+original+web+page&tb...

jere 9y ago
Of course it's going to look awful with broken images. What a weird article.

ajmurmann 9y ago

The article lists that hand curated selections have been replaced by algorithmic recommendations, pointers to DVD sales on Amazon are gone, columns are gone. None of these things sound like a plus to me. Especially given how their algorithms seem to optimize for something (me spending time searching? watching particular movies that clearly aren't a match but Netflix has done incentive for me to watch? No clue) that's not me easily finding the best matching movie. Their interface at least on PS4 also makes it annoying to just read a description of a movie without anything starting to play. Their ratings seem all inflated and useless. I have to go to IMDb or rotten tomatoes to get useful ratings. The best interface for Netflix I've ever had was a Ruby script that used their API to give me a list of movies ranked by their prediction of how much I'd like them. The startling thing was that when that still worked their own interface showed me movies they predicted I'd dislike and didn't show me movies that they thought I'd love. Since the API is gone I can't confirm this anymore but it certainly feels like it. Edit: way back they even used to have a page that was in essence a table of movies that was sortable by rating. That was so useful. Unimaginable today! Edit 2: I'd love it if someone knew and could explain what the Netflix UI is actually optimizing for. I can't believe that it's that they cannot do better. Are they trying to hide lack of content? Are there different money implications of I watch movie A instead of movie B?

ams6110 9y ago
I think it's lack of content. Or lack of good content more specifically. From my perception about 20% of the titles on Netflix are in any way worth watching. The other 80% are just there taking up space in the listings to make it look like I have a lot of choices. I rarely watch anything on Netflix anymore because I feel like I've watched what's worth watching. I check it occasionally to see if there's something new, but I mostly keep the subscription because it's a family deal and others in the household still find some value in it.
pjmlp 9y ago
I also hate it. It is almost impossible to find the foreign movies I care about. Sometimes I find them by language, other times by the name, and worse just scrolling hoping that they get suggested again to me.

rocky1138 9y ago

The quality of Netflix's recommendation engine went downhill quickly after their move away from the 1-5 star rating system last March. I put a lot of time into picking the right values for each of the movies I watched and was constantly amazed and how good its recommendations were. Still a happy subscriber, just a little less so.

closed 9y ago
I personally liked star ratings more, but can see why they'd make the switch. Average star rating is basically a 1 dimensional model, but now what they're doing is communicating a prediction: how much will so-and-so enjoy this show. A show can still have a lower match for all people (similar to having fewer stars). But I think I still like the (assumed) transparency of stars better.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
derefr 9y ago
I don't think their recommendation engine is working any less well; they've just made a higher-level strategic change in what it's trying to recommend. Netflix used to want to give people the "perfect movie for them", expecting that eventually they would run out of perfect movies, and move onto just "pretty well-fit movies", and then run out of those too, and probably unsubscribe at that point. Nowadays, Netflix seem to want to keep people subscribing by making them feel like they have a chance of finding the "perfect movie for them", but only after Netflix has recommended a bunch of those "pretty well-fit" and even some "not-so-well-fit" movies. This is "better" (from Netflix's perspective) for two reasons: 1. it gives people the impression that Netflix's library still has plenty of "perfect" movies to offer them (by stretching them out); 2. it gives variable-scheduled rewards, rather than constant rewards, making people more addicted. I'm betting the new algorithm works much better at keeping people subscribed, despite seeming to work worse. Netflix is a very data-driven company, and wouldn't have switched to an algorithm that could be observed to hurt.
- paxys 9y ago

yosito 9y ago

Holy hell! Netflix has been around for 20 years?!

bkraz 9y ago

I still really like Netflix, but the increased force-feeding of their own content doesn't excite me about the future. I would switch to a competing service if it offered a wider selection of movies, but without any Netflix content. If I found a streaming service that had nearly every movie ever produced, I would pay a much larger subscription fee.

hsljekskfh 9y ago
not really their fault either. i’m not sure if they could have done anything different, considering they don’t own all the movies they used to provide

surfingtheweb 9y ago

For the time being, I still use netflix, amazon, and hulu streaming services. If you've ever used the apps for any of those services on roku, apple tv, or a smart tv, you're likely frustrated by how difficult it is to find something relevant to watch. I often think, "Who thought this UI was good?" That thought leads to, "What if the interface is purposely bad?" and "Why doesn't Hulu want me to find anything to watch?" I don't know how licensing works with these streaming services. I'm beginning to think that because these companies license content from third parties, they have an incentive to discourage people from watching anything. Maybe if you don't watch, then they pay less in licensing fees. The ideal profit scenario is for you to subscribe to Netflix's service, but not consume any content. If you pay Netflix, but never watch anything, they don't have to expend the costs to deliver content to you (licensing and bandwidth). This gives Netflix an incentive to create algorithms that obfuscate content rather than a smart algorithm that suggests relevant content. Does anyone else get this feeling? Does anyone know if licensing agreements are set up on a pay-per-play basis between studios and netflix?

tjr225 9y ago

"Its recommendations, now powered by algorithms, were curated by staffers then. Collections of movies grouped by common themes included Complicated Couples, Serious Spy Action, High-Tech Horrors, and Bad People, Great Movies—precursors to the remarkably specific personalized rows of categories now featured on Netflix. " I for one pine for the days where I could find an individual with similar sensibilities - or better yet NEW sensibilities that I did not know shared, and follow their curation...rather than having some engineered algorithm suggest music and movies to me. Thankfully there are many wonderful radio stations and bloggers who still exist. I find SV has done a terrible job replacing them and for that I am grateful.

mproud 9y ago

“Hey, look at this page from the Internet Archive! ERMAGHERD lulz!”

monster_group 9y ago

Netflix recommendations are so bad they are downright comical and make me laugh every day. I can't believe their developers get paid 300K+. For that kind of salary and the work they put out, they have got to be the world's most unproductive employees.