It's amazing how this describes a number of the tech 'industry disruption' companies... Amazon used to have better quality standards than eBay or Wal-mart, Uber used to be cheaper and have cleaner cars and drivers than Taxis, Netflix used to have a larger variety of classics but now largely makes their own content
What was special about Netflix was this large library of on-demand content and things you may not find anywhere else. I think what early adopters liked about it was you could be deliberate about sitting down to watch something. You'd put some thought into creating your list. We were trained to do this going back to the DVD days - probably even more so during the DVD rental days. And remember that Netflix had that massive collection of quality movie reviews. I suspect that early adopters had much different viewing patterns than the people who hung around on cable for longer.
So what does Netflix do? Make it more like a broadcast. Maybe that's what they discovered was necessary to attract the masses. I don't know. All I can say is it's much different than it used to be and, aside from some really good in-house content, I don't like it anymore.
Nowadays, I never find anything I want on Netflix and am glad I'm borrowing an account, otherwise I'd drop it. Hulu's trying to catch up, but Netflix is easily the most user-hostile media interface I've ever used, and that includes hotel channel guides.
Increased quality is a good marketing ploy for growth, producing shit is a good way to increase margins. I notice a lot of restaurants have great food opening week, and then a return to median over the following year until they go bust.
My biggest peeve is that Netflix keeps dropping and cancelling shows I'm really enjoying. I'm close to dropping them, and every other service. Months close. The hassle and cost of maintaining 10+ subscriptions is a worse experience than the prenetflix days of broadcast. If the industry could get their act together and go the way of music and pay royalties per stream then Netflix would probably have the biggest advantage with their algorithm. But their ux is still painful and proper discovery is completely lacking. I yearn for a Dewey decimal like video categorisation system, and way more high production value sci-fi shows.
Other than opening the settings screen, or playing a video and hitting pause, there is no way to leave netflix alone and not have it make noise/play video. Three seconds after you stop hitting buttons, whatever's selected on-screen becomes a full-video ad for that thing. (with all of the annoying traits of ads, like loud attention grabbing sounds)
I've idle-mindedly mashed buttons to prevent this on console-netflix while trying to have a conversation about what to watch, with no attention being payed to what was actually on the screen.
I recall reading something from some Netflix analytics-obsessed pinhead about the automatic previews where they said they wanted it to behave more like regular TV where something is on as soon as you turn it on. Then they have it automatically play the next episode by default. I recently read about some other feature they were testing where it would just continuously play whatever their recommendation engine thinks you would like. Then you've got the more frequent churn of content.
Netflix today resembles a personalized stream of an old school premium cable channel like HBO. It's designed to help you quickly find something to watch and then send you down a rabbit hole with continuous content that autoplays as soon as the last video ends. On the one hand, I admire them for doing something different than every other streaming service that popped up after they invented the category. On the other hand, I just don't like the experience at all.