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I built the first "post-play" experience for Netflix. It made it so that Netflix would automatically start playing the next episode of the show you are watching after a 15 second count down. We built it in the Silverlight player on the web because it was the fastest way to A/B test new features at the time.

Before post-play, you had to open the episode menu and click on the next episode to play it. We didn't want to do autoplay for a long time because we were afraid people would fall asleep with Netflix playing and it would break the internet. So we included the now infamous "Are you still there?" popup a few minutes into episode 3 with no interaction with the player.

Now it is everywhere - YouTube, Hulu, HBO, etc. And people watch way more TV than they should.



I want to say I hate automatic playing of content after my content is complete but when I really think about it I love it when I want it to do that and hate it when I don't and i'm too lazy to tell my UI which is which.

I guess when something just works your users will assume the cases where it is working properly are just the way things are and the cases where it does something they don't like is your fault.

So well done!


I miss contemplating the content I watch. The attention economy has really perverse incentives. No thinking, only consuming.


I hate, loathe, and despise that fucking thing!

It prevents me from being able to see the credits! Sometimes I want to know who played what part!

I'm okay with an optional prompt that lets me skip the credits if I want to, but that should NEVER be the default!!!


I'd love it if it waited until the video's actually done, like on YouTube.

Note: I work at YouTube :P


> It prevents

It doesn’t…


As I was reading your comment I was thinking "whoa, that sounds like Damien or Robert" and sure enough :)

Hope you are doing well!


Hey Kyle!


This place is bat, haha!


I wonder how much bandwidth this is wasting.

Why not just have a next episode button without auto playing the next episode? Make the autoplay optional and not the default.


I prototyped this as a Java Robots in like 2011 so I could fall asleep to Futurama. I guessed Netflix would take steps to ban it, but later they embraced it.


Ah good old Silverlight. I once wrote a Drag and Drop library in SL. Good times. I miss XAML.




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