At least it doesn't auto-play trailers like Netflix does on my PS4. I spend very little time in their app as a result of that.

My GF's smart TV auto-plays next episodes, even cuts movie credits off after just a few seconds to try to bait us into the next thing. Maybe its just me, but I generally like to see the credits, hear the end music, etc. Rather than actually escorting us into the next video, this UI "feature" just compels us to shut the whole system down out of annoyance.

You can disable "Play next episode automatically" in your account settings on Netflix's website: https://www.netflix.com/HdToggle

The Netflix app on my smart TV honors that setting. Unfortunately, this setting does not stop Netflix from auto-playing the video when you first select it.

The windows 10 Netflix app seems to have a good compromise: When the credits (opening and closing) of some shows (maybe only ones produced by Netflix?) start there's a "Skip credits" or "Skip intro" button, but it's not automatic.

This is a standard Netflix feature. Netflix runs the same code on almost every (TV) platform: consoles, TVs, set-top-boxes, etc.

This decision was indeed perplexing. People don't like things that auto-play as a rule, I would be very surprised if this passed user testing.

This and the parent comment lend themselves to a bigger concern of mine: services not always owning the UX. Either the services have to design multiple apps leading to the kind of inconsistencies that arise naturally from that or the devices have to use some API against whatever UI they happen to support.

Basically, you have to re-learn these services depending on where you're playing them. I feel like Netflix has locked it down a bit but there's always smart TVs, media players, etc. that will never uniformly support a single UX for any given service.

> "People don't like things that auto-play as a rule"

Really? In amazon's case they auto play the next episode, so given that the user statyed up through the entire episode, that means they probably like that series and so like the next episode.

Also I find YouTube autoplays to be more often than not to be enjoyable by me. And I discover new stuff I like that I wouldn't have discovered otherwise.

I often see trailers on Prime before a show starts. Really annoying.

funny because it (amazon video) auto plays trailers before shows on the iphone app

There's reasonable room for disagreement over features of Netflix and Amazon's video UIs, but I think we can all agree that Hulu's interface is horrible and consistently gets worse every time they change it.

Amazon Prime on a Roku is a little better than Netflix on the same device, mainly due to Netflix not wanting to directly expose their inventory. If you add in the non-prime inventory Amazon on Roku is light-years better than Netflix and includes the ability to add e.g. HBO channels, etc.