At long last, you can now disable Netflix’s… | Little White Lies

Incoming

At long last, you can now dis­able Netflix’s auto­play feature

07 Feb 2020

Words by Charles Bramesco

A group of people watching television in a living room, with a woman in a yellow shirt appearing on the screen.
A group of people watching television in a living room, with a woman in a yellow shirt appearing on the screen.
The stream­ing giant has moved to bring an end to those annoy­ing auto­mat­ic previews.

It’s the worst part of Net­flix, after the vague sen­sa­tion that the­atri­cal releas­ing may be on the way out: you’re scrolling through the con­tent library, and when­ev­er you leave the cur­sor over one title for more than three sec­onds, your speak­ers start blar­ing an auto­play trail­er or the pro­gram itself.

It’s noisy, it’s busy, and the effi­ca­cy of hook­ing some­one by yelling the first few sec­onds of a movie at them is, to put it gen­tly, questionable.

Net­flix is not deaf to the people’s cries. The stream­ing giant has announced the addi­tion of a new func­tion­al­i­ty allow­ing users to turn off the auto­play fea­ture. Just like that, jus­tice is served.

It came as some­thing of a sur­prise, how­ev­er, and not just because the gen­er­al pub­lic has been beg­ging for a respite from the tyran­ny of auto­play since the feature’s intro­duc­tion. The recent rev­e­la­tion that Net­flix counts any­thing over two min­utes as a view” sug­gest­ed that the auto­play fea­ture may con­tribute some chunk of the company’s met­rics, from peo­ple fix­ing a snack or using the lava­to­ry while leav­ing the app open.

While the inner work­ings of Net­flix remain a jeal­ous­ly guard­ed secret, this devel­op­ment sig­ni­fies one of two things. It could be that they’re rejig­ger­ing what counts as a watch,” or that they’re suf­fi­cient­ly secure to take what­ev­er that hit might be. In either case, it’s a show of con­fi­dence, and one that makes the user expe­ri­ence that much better.

Most intrigu­ing of all is the idea that Net­flix can be respon­sive to requests aired en masse from their sub­scriber base. Next up, let us all unite as one voice so that we may put an end to the trun­cat­ing of end cred­its by the next episode. Or at least, we can get anoth­er sea­son of The OA.

You might like

Accessibility Settings

Text

Applies the Open Dyslexic font, designed to improve readability for individuals with dyslexia.

Applies a more readable font throughout the website, improving readability.

Underlines links throughout the website, making them easier to distinguish.

Adjusts the font size for improved readability.

Visuals

Reduces animations and disables autoplaying videos across the website, reducing distractions and improving focus.

Reduces the colour saturation throughout the website to create a more soothing visual experience.

Increases the contrast of elements on the website, making text and interface elements easier to distinguish.