Netflix PS3 upgrade is a big step backwards

Netflix is getting worse and worse. Apart from the fact that the service quality is degrading (frequent stops and poor image quality, and the new imposition of the limited number of devices that nobody had ever heard of before), they've just released a pointless user interface "upgrade" for the PS3 version that makes it considerably harder to use.

This screenshot shows four different Netflix layouts. We used to have the top right one. Now we have the bottom right one.

In detail:

• Instead of showing 25 films per page, they now show 8. You can only scroll through them 3 at a time instead of 5, so scrolling through lists is 50% slower. Since we have about 200 movies bookmarked, and each scroll takes about 3 seconds to perform, it takes several minutes to get through our list.
• They also removed the side menu allowing you to access different genres, and now you have to scroll through 15 pages of recommendations before you even get to the categories.
• Even worse, the categories are unordered and they removed the sub-genres, so you now have to scroll through *all* foreign movies (3 at a time) rather than being able to go for, say, French comedies. That means scrolling through 1500 movies instead of 50, which is simply unbearable.

In other words, it's now incredibly slow and inefficient to use, and I cannot see any benefit to the user in doing it this way. It's a typical case of an upgrade for the sake of it.

Looks like I'm not the only person who's fed up either. Here are some extracts from the PS3 forums.

I also hate the change. What I do now is use my PC to search Netflix, and then add anything that I'm interested in to my instant queue.

The new menu stinks! I've only had netflix for a week.The old menu that allowed you to browse thousands of titles in an endless amount of sub categories was awesome. It allowed me to see programming that I could never find with the stupid, useless,regressed, going backwards setup that is in place now.It is completely rediculous to have to browse titles on your pc then search them on your ps3.

OMG this new menu is on purpose! I signed up with Netflix a few days ago and i had a menu that i could drill down through genres and find exactly what i wanted, then at some point this afternoon it changed to this crap. I just got off the phone with customer service from netflix and the guy told me this was a change they made based on customers who preferred it. I told him it's terrible and that having to search on the laptop and then back to the PS3 is redundant and a waste of time.

I also find the menu change to be annoying, they took an awesome service and made it intolerable. I also must use my PC and set it in my instant queue, they need to fix it back.

I used to love Netflix. Now I'm finding myself questioning every day whether it's worth the hassle. I'm off to post a couple of formal complaints on their FB page:

New PS3 Layout

http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=6275848869&topic=16559

PS3 UI

http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=6275848869&topic=16301

Hulu Plus

We recently got a free trial of Hulu Plus. We love Netflix, and don't have regular TV, so we thought we'd give it a go.

The short version: it's got a long, long way to go before it's worth the money.

The long version: the selection of content is pretty lousy. They have a total of 543 movies. That's about 10% of the DVD collection I left behind me, and about half of what Netflix have in just their foreign romantic comedies section. Of those 543 movies, you get a small selection of uninspiring documentaries, a pile of crappy sci-fi B-Movies from the 1950s (Atom Age Vampires, for example), a load of early John Wayne movies, a bunch of straight to video kung fu flicks, and not much more. Out of 543 movies, I found maybe five I wanted to watch, and even those were in the "if there's nothing better to do" category. But guess what, there's something better to do.

The TV selection isn't any more interesting. I'm watching Jack of All Trades, which is fun and which I haven't seen anywhere else. Spartacus: The Motion Comic looks like it'll be worth an hour of my time. And, errr, that's it.

The PS3 user interface is dreadful. They don't, for example, tell you who's in a movie, or who directed it, or when it was made, or give you a rating. They do, however, give you screen space to tell you what network it was provided by. They also give you the ability to sort your movies by network. Guess what, I don't give a damn about the network, I want to know about the actual movies! Navigating around is weird: you can't just click on a movie to find out about it. If you click, you play the movie: instead, you have to press DOWN to access the movie info screen, then click again to see the actual details, then back and click something else to put it in your queue. Even starting and stopping movies is a pain.

I reckon it'll be worth taking another look at Hulu Plus in six months to see if they've improved their user interface and got anything actually worth watching. Until then, we'll stick with Netflix. We've already paid for the first month (we thought it was a month's free trial, but it was actually only a week), which gives me time to finish Jack, but otherwise, we're done with Hulu Plus now. A huge, huge disappointment.

Bye bye DVDs, hello Netflix streaming

I've always had a comparatively large collection of videos and DVDs, numbering well into the thousands. Even before I inherited my uncle's movie collection, I had a lot, but then it got ridiculous. However, when I came to the US, I left my entire collection behind apart from about a dozen I couldn't bear to be parted from. I was a little apprehensive about how I'd feel about that, but as it happens, it's worked rather well.

Recently, we've started using the Netflix streaming more and more, ever since we got a disk that allows us to stream video on demand through the PS3 directly onto our TV (as well as being able to watch on our computers). The quality's fine, with just the occasional hiccup, it's very affordable ($15 a month, which also gets us unlimited DVD rental), it's convenient, in that we can watch stuff wherever and whenever we want, and the range is staggering.

Right now, we have about 200 items queued up, including the following:

• The whole of Xena, Heroes, Jeremiah, Californication, Weeds, Star Trek: TOS and many other American TV series I never got round to watching or which didn't make it to the UK
• Classics like You Can't Take It With You, The Palm Beach Story
• A bunch of silent movies, including Fritz Lang's Destiny
• A huge selection of foreign language films, covering not just European movies, but Moroccan, Israeli, Korean, Japanese (live action & anime), Chinese and lots of Bollywood musicals
• British film & TV ranging from Merchant Ivory classics and BBC dramas like Pride & Prejudice to Mighty Boosh, Eddie Izzard, All Creatures Great and Small, Coupling, Little Britain, and Dr Who from Troughton to Tennant
• Weird indie & art-house movies I've never heard of but which look like they could be interesting, or which I loved and want to see again, like The World's Fastest Indian
• Documentaries galore, from Ken Burns to Walking with Dinosaurs
• A ton of kids' movies and kids' TV, from Golden Compass to Prince Caspian by way of The Storyteller and High School Musical.

There's more appearing every day, faster than we can possibly watch them, but it's quite manageable, because their recommendation system is quite astoundingly good. It really does seem to have a handle on what we like: it will suggest things like "period romantic movies with a strong female lead", and as often as not, it's pretty well spot on. We never have problems finding something to watch, although making a choice is sometimes hard! We don't have cable, and we don't miss it. Between this and music, we're pretty well covered for evenings in.

Obviously it doesn't have everything on here that I could possibly want to watch - it's noticeably short on recent blockbusters, but I can still get those from Netflix on DVD - but that's not the way to look at it. My DVD collection, extensive as it is, doesn't have everything either. However, Netflix' collection is growing a damn sight faster than mine, it has stuff on I wouldn't mind seeing but don't necessarily want to pay even $5 to own, and it has more than enough to provide me with entertainment whenever I feel like it. And, to be quite honest, I can find things a lot faster electronically than searching through shelves and shelves of boxes. It's also completely legal. No torrenting, and no overnight waits.

Since between all four of us we probably watch about five things a day on average, that works out at 10c per item. (That's 6p in English). Or, to put it another way, we watch about 150 movies for the price of owning one or two. When I look at it in those terms, I'd have to really, really like a movie to make it worthwhile buying it.

I've said for a while that eventually we'll get to a point where we can watch videos by paying a flat rate subscription to watch anything we want on demand. That's nearly there. I don't really see much future for DVDs, Blu-Ray or the like. The only real advantage of a DVD is that it has extras which I may (but usually don't) want to watch. This is cheaper, more convenient, more extensive, doesn't rely on a platform that may become obsolete (like the thousands of VHS videos that ended up in landfill) and doesn't fill up my house.