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.