odetrav gabrielle jajuan
Shu Manwill
I am playing with the apollo client and netflix dgs client. One of the things I am looking in Netflix DGS is that. It can accept a schema file which includes types, queries , inputs in one single file and will generate the types and mutation and query builder classes.
With Apollo Kotlin you would write your queries in GraphQL and generate Kotlin models (GraphQL first) while with DGS you would write your queries in Kotlin (using the generated query builders from the schema).
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I've been a user of both Netflix and Prime Video for a few years now. Both are my go-to platforms for consumption of video content. YouTube is third on the list. I subscribed to cable TV last year, but it didn't take much time for me to become a cord cutter. After watching my daily habits closely, I realized that I wasn't getting any significant benefit out of paying an extra $60/month.
I've been thinking for some time now about how differently I consume video content on these two services. So, I thought of doing a deep dive into the critical parts of the user experience to see if that can help explain some of the difference.
Netflix has a small yet prominent search icon on the top right, which expands into a search box on clicking. The search box also provides hint text to show different ways you can use Netflix search: titles, people, genres.
On the other hand, accessing the Prime Video search for a first-time user is tricky. You can access Prime Video search in two ways: by selecting Prime Video from a big drop-down list on the left of search box or by clicking on hamburger menu on the top left and selecting Prime Video option from the navigation drawer that takes you to Prime Video homepage. On Prime Video homepage, the drop-down list automatically switches to Prime Video. There is no hint text in the search box, though.
The primary goal of the Search is to help you find/discover anything that matches your criteria as fast as possible without distractions along the way. Let's see how both Netflix and Prime Video compare against that goal by searching for "comedy" genre.
Search results are presented in a grid layout of same-size thumbnail images of videos. On the top of search results is a list of additional subcategories to help you narrow down your search quickly. Going back to the main category from any subcategory is slick - just click your mouse again in the search box, and the results change instantly. No need to hit the search button or type the text again.
If you find any of the thumbnails interesting, just hover your mouse over it, and it will expand in size to auto play trailer/small clip of the video. Overlaid over the video is more information about the movie - description, add to list, like/dislike, etc. - which fades away after a few seconds so that you can enjoy the clip without any distractions and decide if you want to watch the complete video or not.
The number of search results is another heuristic to look at while evaluating the efficacy of a search. There is as much an art to it as there is science: showing only a few items matching the search criteria leaves the user wanting for more whereas exhibiting too many will confuse and scare the user away.
I'd say that Netflix has done a decent job here. I see approx. 300 results (might still seem like too many options to pick from, but it's much better than Amazon Prime which we will come to later) in the comedy genre with the ability to narrow it down further using subcategories.
In conclusion, I'd say that blazing fast results, easy-to-see high-resolution landscape thumbnail images, grid layout to show more results on the screen, other suggested categories, and auto play of clips along with additional relevant information about the video - all come together to help you find something efficiently that you might enjoy watching.
Though, there are some areas where I'd love for Netflix to improve to help me make the decision even faster or make results more relevant. Right now, search results appear to be a bit random. Though, as an outsider, I'm not sure how Netflix prioritizes these results. But some of the features I'd love for Netflix to explore are:
As soon as I type "comedy" in the search box, Prime Video auto-suggests a list of categories, with background greyed out, which I can pick from. But, switching between categories isn't an option. The only way for those categories to reappear is either by typing the whole word again or retyping parts of the original word back in the search bar.
I don't like it. I wish I had the option of effortlessly moving between different categories the way I could do it on Netflix. One possible reason I think Amazon is sticking to this format is that's how people search on Amazon to shop for products. Introducing a new search paradigm on top an existing one might create cognitive friction while people buy on Amazon - Amazon's primary business. If that's actually the case, I wish Amazon could find a creative way to work around that constraint.
How search results are presented in Prime Video is even a bigger letdown. Mobile has a limited screen size and navigating and selecting each alphabet through Roku remote is excruciatingly painful. A laptop is the easiest way for me to search.
All the space on the right side seems like a waste of precious screen real estate. "Included with your Prime membership" text is redundant, "Add to Watchlist" and "Ratings" can be overlaid on the image itself, not sure about the importance of information on "Starring" and "Directed by" at this point in the user journey.
I don't get the rationale behind showing results in this format. Some of the decision making elements that help you choose a video - high-resolution images, a short and catchy descriptive text, a small clip/trailer of the video - are missing. Not sure why these elements aren't prioritized in the current list view.
There are filters on the left navigation to help you narrow down search results (talking about the relevancy of some of the filters is a blog post for another day), and if I use the most potent one - videos with 4+ stars ratings, that's still 20,000 videos. Amazon owns IMDB. I wish there were a way to filter based on IMDB ratings. Restricting my search to only 7+ IMDB rating would have narrowed down search results to a few hundred videos, maybe.
Shopping online vs. finding a video to watch online are two very very different behaviors. In the case of an online product purchase, a user may like to see as many options as possible and then use filters to narrow it down, maybe do comparison shopping on a few other websites, or save the product in cart or watch list, maybe talk to a few friends if they're undecided. But in the case of video a user wants to find and watch a video as soon as possible without having the patience to scan through thousands of results.
Second, that a change of 6 VMAF points would be noticeable to a viewer. Both observations proved critical to a recent comparison I performed of per-title encoding technologies which I presented as a webinar here. Consider the data presented below.
The CAE ladder is in the middle, and you see that CAE reduced the seven-rung encoding ladder down to four. On the right, I compare the quality and data rate of the original encoding ladder against the CAE ladder. Before you study the numbers, recognize that I compared streams based upon sustainable data rate.
That is, a viewer with a bandwidth of 1918 kbps would have played the 960540 stream in the traditional ladder, but the 1600900 stream of the CAE ladder, which was encoded at 1,560 kbps. A viewer with a bandwidth of 2,783 would watch the 720p stream with the traditional ladder, but the 1080p stream with the CAE ladder.
On the right, you see the change in data rate, PSNR percent, absolute PSNR dB and absolute VMAF score. Starting at the top, though CAE dropped the data rate of the 1080p file by 105% and 9.7 dB, the VMAF score only dropped by about .64, indicating no visible difference. This is confirmed by the 49.3 dB PSNR score, which would be visually indistinguishable from the original score of 59 dB.
Why was CAE so successful? Because with this low motion, synthetic video, it allowed Brightcove to deliver a higher resolution video to lower bitrate viewers than a traditional ladder. The result illustrates the key advantages of per-title encoding; happier viewers, lower bandwidth consumption, and lower storage and encoding costs from dropping from a seven rung ladder to four.
Back to VMAF, our primary concern as encoding professionals are differences that viewers will actually notice. In this regard, a reliable metric that can predict a just noticeable difference is an invaluable tool.
This is where the streaming revolution comes in. Smart TVs and streaming devices give access to apps such as Netflix, Prime Video, Disney Plus and more, meaning people can watch millions of hours of movies and TV shows, in up to 4K, for set monthly fees, which ends up being significantly cheaper, and tidier, than buying hundreds of Blu-rays.
So it begs the question: why would people bother with physical media such as 4K Blu-ray anymore? As someone with experience in AV retail and now a tester of TVs, I knew there was a quality difference so I decided to check it out for myself and the results were surprising.
For these tests, I used the Panasonic UB154, a budget 4K Blu-ray player and the Panasonic DP-UB820, a mid-range 4K Blu-ray player connected to the Panasonic MZ1500, a mid-range OLED TV, which was set to Filmmaker or Cinema picture mode, and watched the same movies on both Blu-ray and streaming.
Beginning with John Wick 4, I immediately ran into some trouble. Advertised as 4K on Prime Video, I could not get it to stream anything higher than HD (after some research I discovered I was not alone) so I opted for HD quality vs standard Blu-ray.
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