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This is a great list, and OP's frustrations with existing services match mine quite well. > On launch, it must be immediately obvious how to resume watching wh

This is a great list, and OP's frustrations with existing services match mine quite well. > On launch, it must be immediately obvious how to resume watching whatever the user was watching previously. This may be the most important feature outside the video player itself. > If the user was in the middle of watching an episode of a TV show, the most prominent thing on the screen should be a way to continue that episode. If the user just finished an episode, then “resuming” means watching the next episode, and so on. With my speculate hat on, I've hypothesized the lack of this screamingly obvious feature is a deliberate choice designed to encourage users to "discover" new shows, since I imagine that's a metric they want to increase.

majormajor 5y ago
When I worked in the industry this was part of the reason, but another part was "data driven" AB testing on "what results in higher watch minutes per session" and similar numbers - one hypothesis was that there's a significant cohort of users who stopped watching something because they didn't like it and so for them it's wasting real estate that could be used for finding something new. I put "data driven" in scare quotes there because you can observe the immediate per-session metrics but you can't observe the annoyance or long-term frustration with the platform. Or, say, long-term fall-off of watch behavior because now you finished ONE of the things you had had in progress but forgot about the other series because the "continue watching" row isn't presented up front, you had to go dig every time.