Netflix Updating! Are You Very Indecisive About What to watch? Let’s Find Out What Netflix is Up to!
The COVID 19 era has locked everyone’s door and forced them to stay at home. Now the bored people tend to glue themselves around televisions; mobile phones and binge-watch movies and series all day. These days Netflix has been an eye magnet. People are just obsessed with watching movies or series. The boredom has proven to be beneficial for such similar firms. The firm itself said that almost sixteen million people created their accounts just within the first 3 months of the year. This is almost double the new sign-ups it witnessed in the last months of the previous year.
In this while, the trending streaming service had to get its hands on some favorable changes. A new shuffle option is being tested by Netflix for helping the indecisive viewers to pick a random title of a TV series or a movie that will be based on what the viewer has previously seen, their preferred genres, and the titles they may have saved in their “My List” row. The test is being conducted worldwide with selected users. The selected users will be either seeing a “Play Something” option in the Netflix TV app sidebar menu or a “Shuffle Play” button on the profile selection screen. Netflix’s new shuffle test is only being availed on Televisions and is being experimented upon since the month of July.
Netflix said in a statement to Variety: “The purpose of the test is to make it easier for members to find something to watch.” From these tests, Netflix is planning to learn and come up with a permanent “shuffle” feature that will be rolled out for everyone,” and further added that “The hope is to absolutely productize something.”
When asked by a media platform, Netflix added a statement saying “We Are always looking for better ways to connect members with shows and films that they will love. We run these tests in different countries and for different time Periods and only make them widely available if people find them useful.”
Since mid-July, Netflix members have been reporting the existence of these tests on social media platforms like Twitter. Netflix affirmed that ‘Play Something‘ was trialed formerly, but ‘Shuffle Play‘ is currently the only version of the test still in place.
TechCrunch is the first media platform to report on the new tests performed by Netflix since August month and noted that this is yet another way for the service to help subscribers quickly find something that to watch, as well as vertical previews, TV app screensavers, profile screen backgrounds, vertical previews, and pre-roll ads. Only the first 2 have stuck around as permanent features.
This is not the first time that Netflix is experimenting with the “shuffle” feature. In last year’s April month, it put a shuffle button on Television shows, letting the users watch a random episode of a series they have picked. The new shuffle test is naturally much more extensive in functionality.
In this while, Netflix’s revenue increased to 5.76 billion dollars up to more than 27% compared to the same period in the year 2019. Profits almost doubled, from 344 million dollars in the first quarter of 2019 to 709 million dollars.
