Is this Netflix or do you hate browsing on other streaming services as well?

Regarding UI IMO Netflix is still top. Disney+ is somewhat close in handling but noticeably slower and you notice its focus on movies. Series are not as easily navigatable as on Netflix.

Amazon Prime is abysmal. They don't even group different seasons of a series together. Here in Switzerland, it's even worse, I get a mix of French and German stuff recommended.

Part of people's problem with netflix is that it shows them maybe 100 different shows out of the couple thousand they have at any given time, for the rest you basically have to use a 3rd party to discover them. Sure its prettier than it was back when they put everything in a giant tree/list, but now its a dozen or so vertical categories with 20 or so horizontal items and it doesn't even bother to deduplicate shows out of multiple similar rows.

The best netflixy way for me to discover new shows is to log into my wife's profile where she has a 100 different romance/etc movies. Otherwise "whats-on-netflix.com" for example does a better job than netflix itself, including showing a complete list of new additions, and removals, etc.

Perhaps because the UI varies from device to device.

But with the mute button this is easy mitigated. The mute button is one of the most used buttons on my remote anyway.

It feels like they're making decisions to suit themselves rather than me and it winds me up considering they are the more expensive subscription.

However it is irritating that shows I’ve purchased from the iTunes Store occasionally lose their blessed status§ and I can neither put them in up next nor even have the show’s page open to the episode I last watched. Unless I binge the whole show in one sitting I’m gonna be scrolling horizontally past a lot of episodes every time I sit down to watch.

§ my hypothesis is that it is when the package I bought them in gets taken off iTunes (e.g. I got the complete Downton Abbey, but for a few weeks they were doing a every episode and the movie package and you couldn’t buy just all the seasons together, that one even lost its blessed status while I was watching the show, which was a mystifying experience)

I haven't noticed this in France. For a given series, there's a "season" dropdown that has all the seasons, even some which may be unavailable.

However, I hate dubbed movies and series, and I hate that I can't filter out those titles that, for some reason, only offer a French dubbed version.

The dubbing is also horribly done with bored voices that don't match the actors at all. Yet native language (+ subs if native is not English) is often unavailable. Especially on prime

I love a lot of HBO Max content (especially Turner Classic Movies) but the app is experience is painful.

Things that rustle me... - recommending movies/shows I've already watched. There are very few shows I want to rewatch. - recommending trash reality shows. I rarely watch them. - recommending too many shows that are in a foreign language. I will watch foreign shows, but most of my viewing it's just background noise while I workout or something else where I can't easily watch subtitles. - Auto-playing trailers. It's annoying and loud.

Isn’t that right for Switzerland? What’s the issue?

Just bunching all the content "because your country is .ch so you will like all of this stuff" is such a typical American oversimplification.

What's the huge issue? Is preferring German and being presented French some kind of slight?

Also, Netflix already shows so little in their overview, making half of them non-starters is really annoying. The world is not a cookie cutter duplicate of America with just some different language settings. There should be an option for local differences (not just this one but ones that exist in many countries). It's just a total disregard of national and regional cultural differences too.

In fact I'm quite surprised the US has such a harmonised culture because they have huge differences too. I just can't wrap my head around how a Silicon Valley hipster can be just as offended by half a boob on TV than a methodist Midwestern. Though only for the latter it's an actual cultural and religious issue. The level of cultural harmonisation despite all the regional differences is something that's pretty unique in the US I believe. I've travelled a lot and I've not seen this in other countries.

That surprises me - Netflix seem pretty good at accommodating UK culture as a contrast. Local shows like The Crown, for example.

Maybe it's both, I suppose.

For us there should just be a preferred language setting instead of just dumping the user in a certain box because of the IP they connect from.

Well, there are places in Switzerland like Bern that are officially and pragmatically bilingual.

It's this American view that the whole world is 'like America with just a different locale setting' I find really annoying.

Sure, at the local movie theater we have Indian films (probably multiple regions), Korean films, Chinese ones, sometimes Spanish and so on. English is hardly the only language around. My wife (Chinese) consumes a lot of Korean dramas on Netflix.

My feeling about Switzerland when living there is that it was slightly less multi-cultural than the states, having a much stronger desire for immigrants to assimilate and become "suisse" (but disclaimer, I was living on the French side). You can still find the multi-cultural stuff, but version originale is the exception, not the rule.

I travel a lot (at least before Corona) and sometimes Netflix would not even allow me to continue watching a movie in the hotel, in the same subtitle language as I watched it before. Because I connected from an IP in Romania I'm suddenly supposed to speak their language too :S Because the options for captions in other languages disappear. This really annoyed me as I often would pop up in different countries and using a VPN was too slow on crappy hotel WiFi.

It's this kind of shortsighted vision that I argue against. The world is not that simple. Maybe in the US it is but not everywhere.

My knowledge of French is basically non existent so showing stuff that is only available in French is completely useless to me. Even worse, it's confusing as I am not sure if there even is a German version on the site or not.

The strange thing is my profile is set to German. A better experience would be if I could set my preferred languages. If you would get fancy, add sub title options to the mix.

Not sure if you're aware there are already subtitle options?

I think people are here confused why they get offered films in other languages as if it's a bug? It's not - in the UK for example almost everyone only speaks English but we still have a lot of Asian films and series in our catalogue - people just happily watch them with subtitles.

Some of the most popular shows in the UK Netflix are not in English, such as Squid Game.

I mean subtitle options in the settings for preferred languages.

For example if I set my preferred languages to only German I would get movies and films offered that have German subtitles but no German audio. At least on Netflix, not even a search will find you stuff that is English audio only unless you change the profile language to English even if they have German subtitles.

I had an odd experience when watching season 10 of Modern Family. After the final episode of that season, it started playing the first episode of season 11 but it played in English as the German dub was not ready yet. But there was no way to get that episode by the normal UI means, only when switching languages it would show up.

For me, if I want to get the package (in general and not for a specific instance), I'd rather pay upfront (so far as it's not expensive) than the monthly subscription. Psychologically, I feel like - 'I just eat the cost and I'm done'. So I'd rather just pay you $100 for the entire year or say $60 for the entire year of Sirius XM than a monthly thing.