A few months ago, Netflix began to offer the ability to stream movies through the Wii (as well as the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3). It’s a nice little system, but it could be so much better. Here are 10 things Netflix needs to do to make their Wii streaming video experience great.
I have over 200 movies in my Netflix instant streaming queue. This list can be ordered via the internet, but not categorized. If I know I want to watch a comedy, or foreign film, I still have to go through the hundreds of movies to find the one I want.
A queue makes sense for mailing DVDs, but not when you can pick and choose. It would be nice if Netflix let me search by genre and year, but even nicer if I could simply create a set of categories (comedies, TV series, movies to watch with my girlfriend) that would allow me to instantly go through the 10 or 20 movies that I’d actually be interested in considering at any particular time. For now the best I can do is use the Greasemonkey script Netflix Queue Sorter.
I always like to see what new movies and TV series have been added by Netflix, so it’s great that they have a “just added” category. But for some inexplicable reason, they don’t list these programs in the order they have been added. Sometimes the most recently added movies will be several pages down in the list, while at the top will be movies added a week ago. This is how it is done in both the Wii interface and on the website, and it is a truly moronic system.
Netflix, do you know why I’m posting an article on how to improve your service? Because you don’t have a way for users to offer feedback. You offer no way for anyone to send you an email, you have no forums on your site to request features or discuss problems. Perhaps there wasn’t that much need when Netflix was a simple DVD rental service, but instant streaming is a whole new ballgame, and if you don’t learn to play, someone is going to come along and create a service that does it better.
DONE: You can now search by title with the latest version of the Netflix Software! It would be nice if you could also search by cast, as on the website, but it's a great improvement. Yes, I can go to Netflix.com and search for movies, but why shouldn’t this feature be available on the Wii? Is it really so hard to put a search box in the Netflix instant streaming software? I mean, ideally they should give you the whole thing – searching, reading user reviews, having all the movies available for browsing instead of just a subset - but a search would be a nice place to start.
No comments:
Post a Comment