Who Loses In the Streaming Wars?

You do. The user.

It used to be that there was cable, Netflix, and maybe over-the-air if you lived in a metropolitan area. Now you have a choice of literally dozens of streaming services, most of whom want a monthly subscription. Now cutting that cable cord doesn't look so appealing. 

Rolling Stone takes a look at the streaming services and generally finds them wanting. It's not just the plethora of services, but the varying and often frustrating interfaces that they don't like. 

Not all bad interfaces are created equal, of course. Netflix has been at it the longest, and while there’s a lot that could be better about their site and apps, there are also basic things Netflix engineers understand about user behavior that many of their competitors still can’t grasp(*). Hulu has been around nearly as long, yet up until the latest update — which is for the moment only available to some of their subscribers — it seemed like each new tweak was done by someone actively trying to sabotage what, based on content alone, should easily be the best streaming-TV option out there. Amazon has both the best bonus feature of any streamer — X-Ray, where pausing a scene gives you the name of every actor and character in that scene, the name of any songs playing, and other details — and one of the hardest interfaces to navigate, befitting a service that’s an afterthought in a much larger business empire. As for the newcomers, you’d think they would have learned what works and what doesn’t after a decade-plus of streaming TV, yet that isn’t quite the case. The interfaces for the services that have debuted over the last eight months range from “mostly functional” (Disney+) to “why is any of this where it is?” (Peacock).

(*) Although by going first, Netflix also helped shape some of those behaviors, as well as our perception of what is and isn’t a good interface. 

Simply put, there are a lot of basic practices that all streamers should be following, and that most of them don’t seem to understand in the slightest. Here’s our four-point plan to optimize user experience.

I have a couple of pet peeves. First is services that don't show you what you've watched previously (Acorn TV, are you listening). It's painful to return to a series after a while and have to figure out which episode you watched last. The other one is the lack of easy rewind or fast forward controls. Especially with rewinding, I'd like to have a 30-second jump back button. My podcast app (Pocket Cast) has that. Why can't I have it with my videos?