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I agree. Netflix should sell ads. But... They should play them after you've watch an episode of something, and the "Play next episode" button should immediate

I agree. Netflix should sell ads. But... They should play them after you've watch an episode of something, and the "Play next episode" button should immediately skip the ad. The ad volume should be normalized to the same as the episode (or lower), and the ads should have to match the same production specifications as Netflix shows. They should be like small, very short, unobtrusive films that advertise something. So long as I remain in control of what I'm watching, I don't have to watch an ad to access content, the ad is high quality, and the ad comes after the thing I chose, then I'd accept ads on Netflix in the same way I would accept a trailer for a Netflix show. I imagine that bar is probably set too high though.

wodenokoto 5y ago
Some of us would like some silence when a movie or an episode finishes. Currently, the auto playing of trailers is bad enough as it is.
- hericium 5y ago
  You can turn it off somewhere in profile settings on netflix.com
  - burntwater 5y ago
    I've found it to be very inconsistent. I've found that typically episodes will play credits and not auto-forward to the next episode. Movies will sometimes skip credits and move to trailers, sometimes not. I feel like usually they move to trailers. And movies is when I MOST want to watch credits and reflect on the movie, so Netflix is literally doing the opposite of what I want.
  - wodenokoto 5y ago
    Not really. You can turn off auto-skipping to next episode, but depending on the platform you are watching on, it might still autopay trailers after a movie has finished.
- onion2k 5y ago
  Of course, but Netflix itself isn't really designed for that use case. The job of Netflix is to make content you want to watch, not to silence itself so you get some peace. In your situation I'd use the sleep timer setting on the TV itself to automatically turn it off after a given time. It shouldn't be too hard to align it to match the end of the show.
  - wodenokoto 5y ago
    It is totally way too hard to align those things. Most sleep timers works in hours, maybe half hour increment. Looking up the length of a show, estimating when Netflix will interrupt end-credits, is completely unreasonable workaround.
  - fivre 5y ago
    lolwut the job of Netflix is to provide a product its customers want. i don't think OP is in a tiny minority of people who want an option to disable autoplay; it's a desire i've heard expressed quite often. hell, fucking YouTube, a service that exists to play ads and that plays more as you watch more videos, has an option to disable autoplay Netflix gets away without doing this because it doesn't immediately lose them customers, and implementing it wouldn't really gain them any, but i am always quite at people who declare that it's therefore good. i need to figure out some tech service that's growth positive as a function to sacrificing its users' children to Moloch, just to watch the HN crowd cry "well, it's not the service's job to /not/ sacrifice your children to Moloch, and you can put them in an anti-Moloch safe room, so I personally don't see why they shouldn't keep sacrificing to Moloch the children of those that don't bother to go the extra mile to avoid it"
WalterBright 5y ago
Youtube started with no ads, then ads at the end, then ads at the beginning, then ads randomly inserted in the middle. It's like the income tax. First for only the wealthy, then the tax "trickles down" to everyone.
- baal80spam 5y ago
  Time to update the quote? "In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death, taxes and ads."
  - loloquwowndueo 5y ago
    YouTube on desktop with an ad blocker is glorious. (Well as glorious as the intrinsically crappy content itself can be).
    - zelphirkalt 5y ago
      Better use another another frontend, to avoid all the issues and bugs of YouTube's video player and avoid loading tons and tons of unnecessary crap.
- mrweasel 5y ago
  I've been paying for YouTube Premium ever since it became an option, it's basically the only way YouTube is tolerable. It's by fare the subscription I'm getting the most benefit from. If it was not available, my YouTube consumption would drop to damn near zero. When I see other browse YouTube with ads it feels like you're going mad, it's absolutely infuriating to witness. It's difficult for me to see Netflix as being any different. I'm already not getting that much value from the service, so why should I pay if there where ads? One fact which is often overlooked in the non-US markets is the lack of ads. For a service like YouTube, it's the same five ads over and over. There simply isn't enough inventory in the ad space to supply something like Netflix.
webmobdev 5y ago
And ofcourse, most importantly, Netflix (or Disney or Prime or Max) with ads should be free (or really, really cheaper). With internet streaming, we consumers pay for the bandwidth to use any streaming service. And so if Netflix or Disney want to waste my bandwidth with ads, they better be willing to compensate me for it.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 5y ago
  I asked my wife to cancel Hulu live recently because it was $85 USD/month with ads. Insane. She has one or two shows she likes to watch live so I suggested Sling Blue instead. Sling is OK for live stuff but anything on-demand is completely obnoxious with ads. We tried to watch an episode of Atlanta the other day and Sling injected more ads than the length of the show, eg it was longer than 30 minutes of ads to get through the 30 minute show. The inevitable that everyone said was going to happen is finally a reality - streaming platforms are back to where cable was 20 years ago.
- mdasen 5y ago
  > With internet streaming, we consumers pay for the bandwidth to use any streaming service. And so if Netflix or Disney want to waste my bandwidth with ads, they better be willing to compensate me for it. You pay for electricity and TV companies have never compensated you for the electricity used during their commercials. There are lots of occasions that we don't get compensated for things that have costs. For example, let's say you're driving in traffic. There's a stop light. Two cars from the other direction turn onto your street after their light has turned red ("it's been yellow for 3 seconds, but I don't wanna wait"). Your light turns green and a couple cars get through, but you have to wait another light cycle because of those two cars that illegally ran the red light. That's another minute or two of idle fuel usage. You don't get compensated for that and what the other drivers did was illegal. At least with Netflix you'd be agreeing to the ads and a price with a very real option of just not subscribing. There are so many things that you pay for that you don't get compensated for in that micro-accounting way. Heavier vehicles destroy roads requiring them to be repaved a lot more, but the drivers of those heavier vehicles don't pay for that. We all do. It costs way more to deliver things to people in rural areas, but the USPS and many online stores will charge the same shipping for someone in Alaska or rural Montana as someone in NYC despite the fact that the person in Alaska might be only accessible by air and the person in rural Montana might be the only person receiving a package for 5 miles. They might be using $1 worth of fuel just on the end delivery for one person in an area like that, never mind the amount of time that it takes to deliver the packages in such a rural area. ($4/gallon of gas, 20 MPG fuel economy, and a 5 mile distance would be $1) I'm not sure what your situation is (maybe you're on a really bandwidth restricted connection like HugesNet), but "we consumers pay for the bandwidth" is probably one of the smallest pieces of this world to worry about getting compensated for.
sliken 5y ago
If I see a netflix ad I cancel. Just like I did with hulu+ (the paid service), no way am I going to pay a video streaming to waste my time and bandwidth with ads. Similarly first time I see a youtube ad, I'll cancel my youtube premium subscription.
- 01100011 5y ago
  I agree. Yet I feel compelled to say that the HN crowd is not necessarily representative of the general population. I've missed out on some great ideas I thought were dumb because I made the mistake of thinking my brain and interests are similar to others'.
  - spoils19 5y ago
    While I agree, the world would probably better off if it was the case. I think back to a very popular comment about how Dropbox can be simplified to a few shell commands over FTP. There's simply too much useless software out there not solving real human problems.
  - shadowofneptune 5y ago
    The whole appeal of 'cutting the cord' was that you got better stuff at a lower price than cable. Netflix is now pricier than it used to be, and streaming bundles have arrived. Should ads come to Netflix, it's obvious to pretty much anyone that streaming has become what it was supposed to replace.
  - anothernewdude 5y ago
    I feel compelled to say that tech interest has nothing to do with hating advertising and wanting content now. If anything the need for piracy or ad blocking led to a lot of people learning tech skills they would otherwise be completely uninterested in.
  - Fnoord 5y ago
    If about 33% of the users on the WWW use an adblocker, then its likely a considerable amount of them like convenient streaming without ads. Netflix already contains advertising, btw. Its content does, such as product placement (a good example of which being Nokia in the original The Matrix though not Netflix specific). Heck, even Disney+ is advertising: for their merchandise. My kid digs 'Mini Mouse'. What I am not interesting in is wasting my time on ads. I sort of accept it on Prime because I got Prime cheap, and its Prime Video products only. They're testing my limits though, I can tell you that much, and I can also tell you the ads are usually not appropriate for me (although I do have Prime for the Prime specific content, I find it on my own). The moment Netflix starts to waste my time with ads, it becomes less valuable. Because ads is the reason I avoid cable TV. I CBA with wasting my time on BS I don't want (to see). Its the reason I got Netflix in the first place. It makes the product less convenient, and pirating is already very convenient. It just feels better to pay for something while watching the people you paid for acting.
madaxe_again 5y ago
Netflix is full of ads, but you’re so used to them you don’t see them. I can’t remember what it was I watched the other night, but I definitely noticed the 45 second sequence of cereal box, bowl of cereal, cereal box, bowl of cereal, character going “mmm it’s delicious”, cereal box, end scene - and this is just one of many examples. Next Netflix production you watch, pay attention for the placements - there are a lot. Some subtle. Some as subtle as a hammer to the forehead.

wodenokoto 5y ago

Some of us would like some silence when a movie or an episode finishes. Currently, the auto playing of trailers is bad enough as it is.

hericium 5y ago
You can turn it off somewhere in profile settings on netflix.com
- burntwater 5y ago
  I've found it to be very inconsistent. I've found that typically episodes will play credits and not auto-forward to the next episode. Movies will sometimes skip credits and move to trailers, sometimes not. I feel like usually they move to trailers. And movies is when I MOST want to watch credits and reflect on the movie, so Netflix is literally doing the opposite of what I want.
- wodenokoto 5y ago
  Not really. You can turn off auto-skipping to next episode, but depending on the platform you are watching on, it might still autopay trailers after a movie has finished.
onion2k 5y ago
Of course, but Netflix itself isn't really designed for that use case. The job of Netflix is to make content you want to watch, not to silence itself so you get some peace. In your situation I'd use the sleep timer setting on the TV itself to automatically turn it off after a given time. It shouldn't be too hard to align it to match the end of the show.
- wodenokoto 5y ago
  It is totally way too hard to align those things. Most sleep timers works in hours, maybe half hour increment. Looking up the length of a show, estimating when Netflix will interrupt end-credits, is completely unreasonable workaround.
- fivre 5y ago
  lolwut the job of Netflix is to provide a product its customers want. i don't think OP is in a tiny minority of people who want an option to disable autoplay; it's a desire i've heard expressed quite often. hell, fucking YouTube, a service that exists to play ads and that plays more as you watch more videos, has an option to disable autoplay Netflix gets away without doing this because it doesn't immediately lose them customers, and implementing it wouldn't really gain them any, but i am always quite at people who declare that it's therefore good. i need to figure out some tech service that's growth positive as a function to sacrificing its users' children to Moloch, just to watch the HN crowd cry "well, it's not the service's job to /not/ sacrifice your children to Moloch, and you can put them in an anti-Moloch safe room, so I personally don't see why they shouldn't keep sacrificing to Moloch the children of those that don't bother to go the extra mile to avoid it"

WalterBright 5y ago

Youtube started with no ads, then ads at the end, then ads at the beginning, then ads randomly inserted in the middle. It's like the income tax. First for only the wealthy, then the tax "trickles down" to everyone.

baal80spam 5y ago
Time to update the quote? "In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death, taxes and ads."
- loloquwowndueo 5y ago
  YouTube on desktop with an ad blocker is glorious. (Well as glorious as the intrinsically crappy content itself can be).
  - zelphirkalt 5y ago
    Better use another another frontend, to avoid all the issues and bugs of YouTube's video player and avoid loading tons and tons of unnecessary crap.
mrweasel 5y ago
I've been paying for YouTube Premium ever since it became an option, it's basically the only way YouTube is tolerable. It's by fare the subscription I'm getting the most benefit from. If it was not available, my YouTube consumption would drop to damn near zero. When I see other browse YouTube with ads it feels like you're going mad, it's absolutely infuriating to witness. It's difficult for me to see Netflix as being any different. I'm already not getting that much value from the service, so why should I pay if there where ads? One fact which is often overlooked in the non-US markets is the lack of ads. For a service like YouTube, it's the same five ads over and over. There simply isn't enough inventory in the ad space to supply something like Netflix.

webmobdev 5y ago

And ofcourse, most importantly, Netflix (or Disney or Prime or Max) with ads should be free (or really, really cheaper). With internet streaming, we consumers pay for the bandwidth to use any streaming service. And so if Netflix or Disney want to waste my bandwidth with ads, they better be willing to compensate me for it.

SOLAR_FIELDS 5y ago
I asked my wife to cancel Hulu live recently because it was $85 USD/month with ads. Insane. She has one or two shows she likes to watch live so I suggested Sling Blue instead. Sling is OK for live stuff but anything on-demand is completely obnoxious with ads. We tried to watch an episode of Atlanta the other day and Sling injected more ads than the length of the show, eg it was longer than 30 minutes of ads to get through the 30 minute show. The inevitable that everyone said was going to happen is finally a reality - streaming platforms are back to where cable was 20 years ago.
mdasen 5y ago
> With internet streaming, we consumers pay for the bandwidth to use any streaming service. And so if Netflix or Disney want to waste my bandwidth with ads, they better be willing to compensate me for it. You pay for electricity and TV companies have never compensated you for the electricity used during their commercials. There are lots of occasions that we don't get compensated for things that have costs. For example, let's say you're driving in traffic. There's a stop light. Two cars from the other direction turn onto your street after their light has turned red ("it's been yellow for 3 seconds, but I don't wanna wait"). Your light turns green and a couple cars get through, but you have to wait another light cycle because of those two cars that illegally ran the red light. That's another minute or two of idle fuel usage. You don't get compensated for that and what the other drivers did was illegal. At least with Netflix you'd be agreeing to the ads and a price with a very real option of just not subscribing. There are so many things that you pay for that you don't get compensated for in that micro-accounting way. Heavier vehicles destroy roads requiring them to be repaved a lot more, but the drivers of those heavier vehicles don't pay for that. We all do. It costs way more to deliver things to people in rural areas, but the USPS and many online stores will charge the same shipping for someone in Alaska or rural Montana as someone in NYC despite the fact that the person in Alaska might be only accessible by air and the person in rural Montana might be the only person receiving a package for 5 miles. They might be using $1 worth of fuel just on the end delivery for one person in an area like that, never mind the amount of time that it takes to deliver the packages in such a rural area. ($4/gallon of gas, 20 MPG fuel economy, and a 5 mile distance would be $1) I'm not sure what your situation is (maybe you're on a really bandwidth restricted connection like HugesNet), but "we consumers pay for the bandwidth" is probably one of the smallest pieces of this world to worry about getting compensated for.

sliken 5y ago

If I see a netflix ad I cancel. Just like I did with hulu+ (the paid service), no way am I going to pay a video streaming to waste my time and bandwidth with ads. Similarly first time I see a youtube ad, I'll cancel my youtube premium subscription.

01100011 5y ago
I agree. Yet I feel compelled to say that the HN crowd is not necessarily representative of the general population. I've missed out on some great ideas I thought were dumb because I made the mistake of thinking my brain and interests are similar to others'.
- spoils19 5y ago
  While I agree, the world would probably better off if it was the case. I think back to a very popular comment about how Dropbox can be simplified to a few shell commands over FTP. There's simply too much useless software out there not solving real human problems.
- shadowofneptune 5y ago
  The whole appeal of 'cutting the cord' was that you got better stuff at a lower price than cable. Netflix is now pricier than it used to be, and streaming bundles have arrived. Should ads come to Netflix, it's obvious to pretty much anyone that streaming has become what it was supposed to replace.
- anothernewdude 5y ago
  I feel compelled to say that tech interest has nothing to do with hating advertising and wanting content now. If anything the need for piracy or ad blocking led to a lot of people learning tech skills they would otherwise be completely uninterested in.
- Fnoord 5y ago
  If about 33% of the users on the WWW use an adblocker, then its likely a considerable amount of them like convenient streaming without ads. Netflix already contains advertising, btw. Its content does, such as product placement (a good example of which being Nokia in the original The Matrix though not Netflix specific). Heck, even Disney+ is advertising: for their merchandise. My kid digs 'Mini Mouse'. What I am not interesting in is wasting my time on ads. I sort of accept it on Prime because I got Prime cheap, and its Prime Video products only. They're testing my limits though, I can tell you that much, and I can also tell you the ads are usually not appropriate for me (although I do have Prime for the Prime specific content, I find it on my own). The moment Netflix starts to waste my time with ads, it becomes less valuable. Because ads is the reason I avoid cable TV. I CBA with wasting my time on BS I don't want (to see). Its the reason I got Netflix in the first place. It makes the product less convenient, and pirating is already very convenient. It just feels better to pay for something while watching the people you paid for acting.

madaxe_again 5y ago

Netflix is full of ads, but you’re so used to them you don’t see them. I can’t remember what it was I watched the other night, but I definitely noticed the 45 second sequence of cereal box, bowl of cereal, cereal box, bowl of cereal, character going “mmm it’s delicious”, cereal box, end scene - and this is just one of many examples. Next Netflix production you watch, pay attention for the placements - there are a lot. Some subtle. Some as subtle as a hammer to the forehead.