Speaking as a consumer, Netflix’s solution is objectively better than it’s competitors. It handles network blips better, it’s more responsive to use, it has far fewer random bugs you need to work around.
You can argue whether or not that edge translates into more revenue, but the edge is objectively there.
Agree. Hulu, HBO/Max, and Disney Plus each do most of these:
- frequently decide that episodes I've watched are either completely unwatched (with random fully watched eps of the show mixed in).
- seemingly every time I leave at the start of the end-credits, I surely must have intended to come back and watch them.
- rebuild the entire interface (progressively, slowly) when I've left the tab unfocussed for too long. Instead of letting continue where I was, they show it for less than a second, the rebuild the world.
- keep resetting the closed-caption setting to "none", regardless of choosing "always" or "on instant replay"; worse, they sometimes still have the correct setting in the interface, but have disabled captions anyway.
Netflix has only once since they started streaming forgotten playback position or episode completion. They politely suggest when to reload the page (via a tiny footer banner), but even that might not appear for months. They usually know where end-credits really start, and count that as completion. They don't seem to mess with captions.
Hard to speak "objectively" as a consumer who has their own regional biases and knows none of the sausage underneath.
Maybe you're in a rural area and Netflix scaled gracefully. Maybe you're deep in SF and Netflix simply outspent to give minimal disruption to a population hub. These could both be true but don't speak to what performs better overall.
