Content discovery challenges are forcing the average consumer to spend 10.5 minutes finding something to watch each time they access their streaming services according to Nielsen
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.
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.