I agree. You can't even leave Netflix running on a device and leave the room because it will just start playing something without any actual user input! And it appears none of the apps let you turn this behavior off.

Netflix already seems to have no problem getting people to watch hours and hours of shows as a result of having high quality content. Why do they need to perform cheap tricks like auto-preview to bump up user stats, as others have pointed out, at the expense of user happiness/preference?