Like many people I've had a Netflix account for a long time - I can't recall the last thing I watched on their streaming service. It has probably been four months since I've used it to watch a movie for example. Their library is increasingly complete trash outside of a few original content programs. I'd cancel it if it weren't so cheap, mostly I keep the subscription as an entertainment fall back (in the category of: well, maybe I'll watch something on Netflix, oh, nope). I suspect I'll just ditch Netflix in the near future and be done with it, as I'm pretty happy with Prime as essentially a freebie to my Amazon shopping.

Or edge cases like me will get that little boost to just give up on Netflix. I already use them less than other streaming services, and I could always just turn it on and off again.

Honestly one of the only reasons I keep it is because I have so many movies that I've rated and didn't want that time investment to go to waste. I guess now that isn't going to be a factor.

This!

My dream is to build an open source app that gathers all these personal ratings (from Netflix to Pandora to GoodReads to restaurants) and puts it back on where it belongs: the users hand!!

Unfortunately finding the time to work on this will be tricky..

Anyone knows if that's a thing already?

I've rated thousands of movies and shows on Netflix, not just what I streamed or received from Netflix on disc but anything I've seen anywhere that I can recall and came across on their site. Having rated something is also a reminder that I've seen it. I didn't want to lose all that so I downloaded the pages [0]. I'll figure out how to scrape them and put them in a better format some other time.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/netflix/comments/5zzc4g/batch_downl...

If you go to your ratings page and scroll down so they all load this worked for me (paste into console)

  ratings = [];
  jQuery('li.retableRow').each(function (i, row) { 
    ratings.push({
      id: jQuery(row).find('.title a').attr('href').replace('/title/', ''), 
      title: jQuery(row).find('.title a').text(), 
      rating: jQuery(row).find('.starbar .personal').length 
    }) 
  });

then

  JSON.stringify(ratings)

Or for CSV:

  ratings = '';
  jQuery('li.retableRow').each(function (i, row) { 
    ratings += 
      jQuery(row).find('.date').text() + ',' +
      jQuery(row).find('.title a').attr('href').replace('/title/', '') + ',' +
      '"' + jQuery(row).find('.title a').text().replace('"', '""') + '",' +
      jQuery(row).find('.starbar .personal').length  + "\n"; 
  });

then print out the ratings variable.

That's the streaming site page which has less information and other problems (follow the link).

I pulled mine from https://www.netflix.com/MoviesYouveSeen. I did notice a bunch that just said MOVIE but that was just a handful. My ratings page goes back to 2005 and I'm not subscribed to the DVD plan anymore.

Why on earth would you use Netflix as a rating service? First of all their library lacks a lot of great movies, or info about the movies they have. Netflix isn't IMDB.

If you include the DVD service they have practically everything. I've been rating movies I've watched in Netflix since 2005-ish. IMDB makes sense, but I chose Netflix and now I'm stuck with them. Data silos suck.

>If you include the DVD service they have practically everything.

Though quite a bit less than they used to. My observation is that more and more back catalog type of items are no longer available.

They're definitely not replenishing stocks of some DVD's, which I suppose makes sense given the trend. I would assume if they get a certain number of requests they probably do though?

Or is that my wishful thinking?

Maybe? The thing is that the incentives don't really align to make this a real priority of theirs and they've been pretty clear that shipping physical DVDs is not their long-term business model. So long as a lot of people don't start canceling their DVD service because of unavailable disks, they don't have real reason to replenish.

Of course, given that they pretty much put every other rental place out of business, your only choice in a lot of cases is just to buy a disk if you want to watch something that isn't available streaming.

Almost all of the ratings I did were back before they even had a streaming service and the library was great. Plus it was helpful to get good recommendations. Now it doesn't really matter, but all of those ratings are locked in.

I've looked before halfheartedly for a way to export them but now that they cut the API off it doesn't seem like there's a great way to do that.

This lock-in is a pain. A similar thing happens with music streaming where getting playlists between services is just awful.

That is one reason I've always preferred to control my music directly. Music in particular is something I can't stand to have discontinuity of playlists and collections with.

Spotify reordered my lists. It frustrates me just less than the chore of fixing them would, which is a special class of irritation.

I hear you. It's one of the few things that actually elicits a physical response me from... a kind of shiver of anxiety. I put time and effort and maybe even a little bit of myself into my music lists... it's personal!

That was definitely part of it or me too; the rating system has always been a draw. It took time to make it actually respond the way I needed it to, and now it's just... sigh

That used to be a big deal for me too. I had a little happy moment back when I rated my 1000th movie. Oh well.

What other services do you use? I paid for prime, so i've watched some stuff on prime video, but there's really not much on there. Netflix is pretty much my only option for most TV shows. Worth noting I'm in Canada.

If you enjoy Anime or Asian drama (asian drama being live action, not animated) Crunchyroll has a huge catalog. It fills the void that Netflix has between two big Netflix Originals.

Edit: Giving away one of my 48h Crunchyroll premium guest pass. No credit card required. I'm not working for Crunchyroll in any way, they give out guest pass monthly to premium users. First one to use this code wins: UWWJAQTDKYZ. Note that I will receive a notification telling me your username and perhaps your email address, if privacy is important to you.

I'm in the US here, so I'm not sure where out options differ. For me, I do (as a poster below noted) like anime so Crunchyroll is a good choice. Hulu is good for seasonal TV stuff, and then I actually use a smartDNS to get access to UK channels. It's probably a matter of taste though... I don't like most movies, and prefer longer-forms for telling stories.

>use a smartDNS

At that point, isn't just plain old piracy more convenient ?

Sadly, the simple answer is "yes".

I used to use a VPN to watch US Netflix, but they started to block known VPNs and I didn't feel like spending time on workarounds. On the other hand, downloading the latest episode of some TV series takes only a few mouse clicks. For sure easier than fighting geo-restrictions.

I still pay for Netflix, but doesn't really watch it much because of the tiny catalog available to me locally, I simply want to support them. Perhaps it will make me feel better if I would download any of their content. :)

>Sadly, the simple answer is "yes".

>I simply want to support them.

Nothing to be sad about. Also curious, why do you want to support them ? Being a market leader, Netflix is a unique position to influence some of these regressive practices. More support is clearly not helping; it's only making it worse by creating monopolies that exert even more negative influence.

The biggest problem with Netflix is that it is not able to obtain rights for a lot of movies or series so you don't have a full catalog. So series and movies are fragmented between providers or totally unavailable​.

Netflix is not much of a market leader until it contains at least 90% of the movies i want to watch, which can't happen without enough leverage from their part given by user support.

I do like some of their own content. I also like their general business model and I believe (well, I hope) that the stupid geo-restrictions are results of old-school licensing and not active business decisions made by Netflix.

But ofc, I wouldn't mind if they had some real competition, I don't want a monopoly.

>(well, I hope) that the stupid geo-restrictions are results of old-school licensing and not active business decisions made by Netflix.

Geo-restrictions have existed forever. What Netflix started was actively blocking entire ranges of IPs belonging to vpns and commercial ISPs (cloud providers like aws, dedicated servers like ovh etc.). This should fall under some corollary to net-neutrality where a service cannot discriminate between ISPs. Does such a corollary exist in countries that have some form of net neutrality (US, India, Netherlands etc.) ? Can someone with legal expertise comment ? From my standpoint, they can have geo-licensing, but should stick with some consistent way of showing content either based on billing info or IP. Blocking out vast portions of the internet because it doesn't suit them should clearly be some violation of laws like net neutrality.

There is a proposal in the EU that would prevent "unjustified geo-blocking" but I'm not holding my breath waiting for it to become law.

I've been so long out of that game, I wouldn't know where to begin, so not for me, no.

I have to say, I quit Netflix a few years ago after a long membership, due to security concerns (it was a nightmare at the time). Recently I started my membership up again, and I'm really disappointed with their library. Every movie I've wanted to watch has turned out to not be available for streaming. They've got some good shows, but I'm getting tired of super heroes and I don't always want to watch television, sometimes I want movies.

I'm on the brink of cancelling my membership as it is, this certainly won't help, though it's obviously the proverbial straw rather than a big deal in its own right.

Indeed. Note that Netflix has never offered a filter by rating, or the ability to hide already-watched or disliked content.