Burying the long tail on Netflix
On slow nights I’ll often watch something on Netflix, Hulu, or Amazon Prime. There’s many great films and TV shows available; if you’ve had access to all three services over the last year you could have caught The Witch, Under the Skin, The Handmaiden, and OJ: Made In America. But most content is hard to find, buried under poor suggestion algorithms and even worse user interfaces. Given how our watching habits are consolidating around streaming, that’s a big problem.
Let’s focus on Netflix: the service spent $6 billion on original content in 2017, with plans to release 80 original films this year. However, that rapid pace becomes an undigestible blur when any single title’s discoverability is so limited. Take Macon Blair’s I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore (IDFAHITWA). The Netflix exclusive won the Grand Jury prize at Sundance and got decent reviews elsewhere. Genre-wise, its off-kilter sensibilities are a match for what I’ve seen elsewhere on the service. Or The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected); it’s one of Noah Baumbach’s best films in years, and I watched his earlier feature Frances Ha on Netflix. But browsing through the Netflix app on my Apple TV, IDFAHITWA and Meyerowitz completely flew under my radar.