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Study: Streamers Now Wasting Record Amounts of Time Finding Something to Watch
(www.tvtechnology.com)
this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2023
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I joke that I pay 15 dollars a month to watch thumb nails of movie box art scroll by from right to left. I've thought a lot about this, why was it easier to find a movie to watch when you drove to a video rental store? I think it's because there was a shift in how descriptions of movies were being done from Tape/DVD era to streaming. You'd get a few paragraphs and a few pictures on the back of a DVD or Tape, but on streaming you get one MAY BE two sentences. Plenty of times I passed by a movie on netflix called "The Devil's Rock" the box art look like cinemax T'n'A garbage, and the description made it sound very run of the mill shitty horror relying on tits and shitty monster effects. I ended up watching the movie and I was really impressed on how well it was done and how god damn poor the description was.
I also think the move toward algorithms deciding every single fucking aspect of what we see across all platforms has had a huge part in this trend. When combined with the shitty non-helpful descriptions, the algorithm just randomly picks a fraction of whats available to show you in weird, always different categories. When you'd go to a video store, they had back stock, which was organized by genre. So you could walk in and just be in the mood for a horror movie, or a sci-fi movie and browse based on that interest. It's a lot harder to browse based on genres on most streaming apps, Netflix used to let you look at a full list of genres but most streaming services have moved away from that.
So in summary, shitty descriptions for movies, ever shifting categories where you have little control in what you get presented. This makes the total available list of movies feel amorphous. No way to, or not easy to find genres to help narrow down based on a general mood. It's ironic, we have more access to just about any movie you want, but it's harder to actually settle on anything in particular. Also, the move toward streaming has meant that if a movie isn't carried by any major platforms, it for all intense and purposes, doesn't exist. For many years, it was very difficult to find Dogma any where to stream, as an example.
I could make suggestions on how to fix this, but I don't know, maybe they'd help, maybe they wouldn't. It doesn't matter because all tech companies are in fucking love with their algorithms to steer users.
Don't really agree. The video rental store forced you to make a decision because you spent time to go there and the social pressure of actually chosing something instead of awkwardly shuffling away huffing something about forgetting to buy milk. For streaming there is no such pressure or urgency. You'd have something to watch every time if the app forced you to make a decision via say a time limit before it refuses to open and/or some rewards for consistently making fast decisions on what to watch.
I do think the descriptions are very poor, but movie box art and synopsis have always been pretty shit, it's just more shit now.
Regarding your algorithm rant it obviously doesn't fit you but on the whole it helps guide people towards choices they'd enjoy. People tend to lock up when overwhelmed with choices so they try to narrow it down. You on the other hand would prefer to slowly peruse a giant genre based category, but that isn't the norm. However I do agree that they should provide the option, because we're all different and it's good to cater to all types.
I think it depends on how much of the content you have already watched. I've personally watched a lot of Netflix in the past year and it keeps suggesting stuff to me that I've already watched. And I don't mean the "watch again" category. Literally every category on the main page contains stuff I've already watched recently and rated.
I also rate every title I watch, in hope of feeding the algorithm. It does offer me new releases which fit, but anything older is completely hidden behind recommendations that never really change (no way to hide away content i don't want to watch).
I get your point about it being good to guide people towards things they might like, but evidently from the article we are commenting on it's not really helping on the whole.
I'm just saying the study is a bit flawed in that before we zapped channels but it didn't take that long to go through the list and then you either picked something or didn't watch. Going through all streaming services and the content they have takes far longer. It's a bit like saying people spend far more time in their car after moving to the suburbs. Sure they can work remotely or in the suburbs but they can also work in the city, which is far likely than the reverse of city people working in the suburbs. Not a very good analogy, could probably come up with a better one, but I'm simply saying it's a lot easier to waste time browsing now.
To continue on the zapping comparison the algorithm in that situation would put the channels you normally watch first. It wouldn't stop you from zapping through all of them but in many cases it would reduce the number of channels you zap through. Same thing here, if you're looking for something matching your regular pattern the algorithm reduces the time to pick, but if you want something different it doesn't help and we're back to a problem of how to make a catalog of 1000 movies "perusable" with a remote.
I can appreciate how algorithms might be helpful with seeing what you like and helping you find other stuff similar for you to enjoy. I think the issue comes when you end up getting pigeon holed and only see certain things, despite maybe wanting to see something completely different. I noticed this when I saw what my Dad's Netflix looks like compared to mine. He had all sorts of movie suggestions I've never seen before due to his different watching patterns.
We're both in agreeance that they could do a better job with movie descriptions though.
I don't remember it being that way. Granted I was a kid back then, but I loved being at the store and just looking at VHS cases in the horror section. Never really got to choose and I remember being there for an hour or so cause my mom and her friend also couldn't decide what to get.