New Netflix Features

Netflix has quietly added two interesting new features to their Web site. When they receive a movie from you, the next time you visit Netflix.com you'll see this expanded ratings box:

This will make it a lot easier to suggest movies and write quick reviews. I have rated almost 400 movies because it's so quick and easy, and I like the way they've expanded on the feature.

They've also added a quiz to the Friends page:

Thanks to Alex for sending this in.

Comments

[Kathryn]

I'm probably the only person who can guess the answer to the Friend's Quiz. A bit surreal to visit your site (part of my morning ritual) and see "myself" referenced.

Interesting idea, but I wonder if it will get people using the Friends feature more. Does anyone else use it or find it fun/helpful? Maybe my friends are duds, but I don't find too many people using it. Lists of what others just watched gets dull. Only one person has actually "suggested" something. I was hoping it would be a bit more interactive I guess. I'm curious how others feel?

[Becky]

They've also added a "most suggested" list, which for the last two weeks, contains the following titles:

• The Notebook
• Garden State
• Napoleon Dynamite
• Shaun of the Dead
• The Station Agent

[Adam]

Has anybody else seen the new "plus signs" thing in the queue? The explanations of what they are, are a little vague. So I suddenly have 7 movies in my 5 movie queue!
Netflix says this:
Q: What does the plus sign next to a movie in my rental queue mean?
A: The plus sign indicates a disc that is in addition to your library size (program level). An extra disc can be a result of a number of things, including the following:
A replacement disc is being sent to you as a result of a disc you have reported as damaged;
The rental slot has been reassigned by the account owner;
A title is being shipped before the return is completely processed; or
You have a bonus rental

Anybody know what's going on?

Did you recently create a profle? If you did, those are the extra movies left over in your queue after you assigned slots to a sub-account. Once you return two discs, they will go away, and your subaccount will start shipping.

[skebenin]

A plus is a temporary bonus disk. In truth, it's not new - it's been around for at least a couple of years.

It means what the FAQ says - it's a disk that shipped before a matching return is logged by the system. It can happen when you report a broken disk and NetFlix ships replacement. It can happen if you have a two-disk selection at the top of your queue (Gangs of New York for example) and they ship both disk at once.

And it can happen when they process a return before the system has a chance to update your queue for returns. I think that's probably the case here, hence your confusion.

You might ask how this is possible. I can only guess, but it's probably the result of interactions between multiple software subsystems. The shipping subsystem notified the queue subsystem of new shipments before the return subsystem notified it of returns recieved.

[Adam]

I'm guessing the latter is what happened, as nothing unusual (broken discs etc.) has happened for a couple of weeks. And I was just complaining earlier today that the movie I mailed Friday should really be there by now.
Huh. Never seen this happen before in 14 months. I guess I hoped they were trying new ways to expedite turn around.
Thanks.

[Alexi]

these are all superficial additions. if Netflix really cared about its customers, it would create an option of "Ship titles in queue order from any location" or "Only ship from your closest location" ~ THAT would be extremely helpful! it's been suggested to Netflix since they started, and each time you mention it to customer service, they act like it's the first time they'd ever heard of such a thing, and agree that it's a great suggestion and will pass it on... yeah, right! we'll keep getting these lame "who cares" type bells'n'whistles, but still NOTHING to help speed up receiving rentals. (which is the MOST IMPORTANT aspect of renting via snail-mail)

[J-Bird]

RE: Plus signs...

I got a couple the other day. They came about because two discs were received, but didn't get noted as received before two more discs went into the shipping queue. By the end of the day the plus signs were gone and the movies that were received were taken out of the shipping queue.

[Mike Christianson]

More often than not, when I return to Netflix's site to rate a movie that I just returned, the recommendations and friends features are unavailable. To be honest, it's been happening more and more frequently over the last two months -- I'm getting pretty annoyed.

Am I the only one that's experiencing these unavailable features?

[Stacy]

I haven't seen recommendations be unavailable much, just once or twice and they were back within half an hour.

I wonder why they removed the star rating from the Queue view. I liked it, it helped me see which movies I've got listed are more likely to be stinkers and thus not a priority. I sent a request that the Queue be customizable, with fields you can turn on or off.

I can't really comment on the Friends functions since the only friend I've got has only rated 2 movies. Anybody wanna be my friend? :)

Someone said the rating stars only show up if you have less than 100 movies in your queue. I checked and I have 214 in mine and no stars. One of my profiles has 86 and it has stars.

[M-Class]

I have to chuckle today... after reading about the ratings reminder change I go to have a look...

Doh! Some of our ratings have disappeared... again! We're down from nearly 300 rated to only 160 this time. This is the fourth time this has happened. I'm seeing recommendations for stuff we've already watched!

[Chris]

I've got to totally agree with Alexi. Even a feature that showed you which location your dvd shipped from would be nice so you would know about how long it would take to arrive in the mail (an answer to the question--Will it be here for Friday night?). And an option like Alexi talked about would be great regarding the customer choosing acceptable distribution center locations.
I don't care so much about recommendations and preferences and friends because I don't have any personal friends in the club. I never review movies because it's seems like a waste of time if even a second is spent on it when a million other people are.
These features would also be a huge plus for Blockbuster too because shipping time is usually a day longer, it might even make their website better than Netflix's overall.

I rate the movies I have rented from Netflix so that it doesn't show them to me on the site anymore. It makes it easier to find things I haven't seen when I'm not looking for a particular movie.

[aa]

Netflix shows wrong ratings? If you see the average user rating number on a movie page (at the bottom of it on the right)it will say something like 3.5, but when you look at it graphically it will show 4.5 (four out of 5 stars will be 'red' and the last star will be half 'red')...

for example: for movie Air Force One:
Average of 1,154,302 ratings: 3.7 stars
but the graphics show almost 4 1/2 stars turned 'red'...

doesn't make any sense...