Autoplay is the devil

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iljitsch

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  • #1
    I just watched an episode of The Bing Bang Theory on HBO Macs or whatever. (Don't judge me. The early seasons are actually funny.)

    It then wants to proceed to play the next episode! WTF?!? That I chose to play one episode doesn't mean I want the rest of the season and all following seasons blasted into my eyeballs. What's up with that? Can't streaming services just quit while they're ahead?
     
    cateye

    cateye

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  • #2
    I think you're old-man-yelling-at-clouds up against how most people do watch shows on streaming services now: They binge watch, one after another. When you want to be done, you hit stop. That this is the default behavior on every streaming service I can think of suggests it's intentional and what the majority of users want.

    Personally, I'm with you—I want to watch the specific show, season, and episode I select and nothing else. Yet, I notice my wife likes what she's watching to just keep playing. But she tends to watch the latest Netflix show or The Office (for the 400th time) or whatever while knitting, drawing, etc., whereas I like to sit down to watch something as a focused activity. I don't use television as background noise. And I suspect that's where people like me (and you) part ways with "the crowd."
     
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    iljitsch

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  • #8
    This is what I read initially:
    cateye said:
    I think you're old-man-yelling-at-clouds up against
    Click to expand...
    Anyway:
    cateye said:
    how most people do watch shows on streaming services now: They binge watch, one after another. When you want to be done, you hit stop. That this is the default behavior on every streaming service I can think of suggests it's intentional and what the majority of users want.
    Click to expand...
    I'm not necessarily convinced of the latter. They sometimes do really annoying things because it gets them something they want. For instance, Netflix relentlessly pushing suggestions in your face with continuing something you watched previously and your to-watch list items located way below the fold. That drove more "engagement" but it sure annoys a lot of people, I'm guessing the majority.

    BTW, anyone else find the very frequent request to select "who's watching" annoying, especially if there is only one profile?

    At some point Netflix also started to autoplay previews as you were perusing available content. Is that something people like or feel neutral about? (As you can guess by now, not me.)

    cateye said:
    Personally, I'm with you—I want to watch the specific show, season, and episode I select and nothing else. Yet, I notice my wife likes what she's watching to just keep playing.
    Click to expand...
    So when she''s done, she just stops in the middle of something? Or be ready to grab the remote fast enough to stop playing at the end of something before the next thing starts?

    Either the HBO Max people are reading along have their continuous delivery honed to a tee because it now has the autoplay on/off setting in the LG WebOS app as well as on the AppleTV app, or... I wasn't paying attention last night. But, problem solved.
     
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