“I am begging these companies to hire some people who love movies. Or have watched a movie.”I hate streaming app UX.
✨ Hate Read Season 2 is brought to you by the legendary champion of indie media herself, Ruth Ann Harnisch, of the Harnisch Foundation. ✨
Streaming services not only dominate how we think and talk about entertainment, but also how we discover it, consume it, share it, and comment on it. There are endless analyses of the business of streaming, bottomless chronicles of The Streaming Wars, an ambient state of speculation and hype around the new season of “Severance” or “The White Lotus,” and, of course, approximately seven zillion episode recaps. Want a 2,000-word breakdown of Episode 1 of “Love Is Blind: Sweden”? There are 10 to 15 media outlets that have already anticipated this very need. But there is one aspect of streaming that doesn’t get nearly as much attention: the experience of using the apps themselves, i.e., what you encounter when you open them and try to find and watch something. We should be talking more about the design and function of the actual product — the price of which keeps rising all the time — because on this one thing, we can agree: They are BAD across the board. Let’s start at the start, with simply opening the app. Frequently –— and by that, I mean a couple of times a week — when I try to open the Hulu app on my phone, I get a blank screen. Nothing. It’s like trying to start an old car in the cold, where I sometimes need two or three attempts to bring it rattlingly to life. (That Hulu so badly botched its livestream of the Oscars did not come as a surprise to anyone who has Hulu.) Once Hulu has decided to wake up, I’ll eagerly scan the home screen to see what gems the algorithm has selected for me. As I write this, the lead image shows me something called “Scamanda,” a docuseries about a woman who faked a cancer diagnosis for profit, I think? It’s hard to tell much from the ambiguously meager three-line description under “details.” Even more questionable is why I’d get recommended this show at all, as someone who has never cared about or watched true crime; the algorithm is either dumber or more indifferent than we think. Maybe “Scamanda” is not my thing. No problem. I’ll jump back into something I’m already watching, like “The Great.” What an aptly named show! I love “The Great!” Except Hulu seems to have no memory of my having watched it ever. It certainly does not appear under the “continue watching” section, so jury’s out on what that section is even supposed to be for. (Maybe “The Great” wouldn’t have been canceled if people had an easier time finding it.) The decline of human expertise in all aspects of life, from customer service to the trades to government, is old news at this point. But still I am amazed at how degraded the streaming experience is thanks to a complete lack of curatorial judgment. I am begging these companies to hire some people who love movies. Or have watched a movie. Recently, I was browsing Max when I came across “The Piano Teacher,” which I had already watched. “The Piano Teacher” stars Isabelle Huppert as a brilliant but damaged pianist, emotionally stunted, suffocated by her overbearing mother. She’s a masochist who is unable to experience happiness with another person. She sabotages a star pupil in the most brutal way. It is DARK and hard to watch at times. Max displayed it in a category titled “raunchy fun.” On the detail page, under “you may also like,” Max suggested “Hung,” the HBO comedy series about a guy who has a big dick. Clearly, movie and show descriptions, all obviously written by AI, are scant at best, completely misleading at worst. (The garbled description for “The Piano Teacher” manages to be both: “Erika Kohut is a piano teacher at the Vienna Conservatory prestigious music school in Vienna.”) AI has also ruined captioning, a feature that has become necessary because of the poor sound quality of streaming. Often text does not match the dialogue, with sentences paraphrased or homonyms substituted for the words actually spoken. Once you do the work of finding something to watch — and it is always more work than you anticipated — the video player presents its own challenges. Players are… forgetful. They forget your viewing settings. They forget where you paused when you needed to go to the bathroom or get a drink. But my favorite example of completely unhinged player design is the roll-over state during live sports on Paramount+: if you happen to roll your cursor over the action, intentionally or accidentally, a TV Guide-style menu of alternative program listings slides in and blocks half the screen. No one asked for these vibe-destroying disruptions. No one needs them — except for the media conglomerates at whose pleasure we serve, I suppose. It’s all about keeping us moving on to the next thing (*Oliver Twist voice* Please, sir, might I have a moment to watch the credits before you begin the next episode?), goosing the numbers for the shareholders, and justifying the billions they’re spending on content. I’m grateful for that investment. We’ve never had so much good stuff to choose from. I just wish the streaming companies spent a fraction of that money on improving how we get to it. At least Sisyphus didn’t have to keep figuring out how to keep the captions on. —Shirley BingelyYou are reading a pseudonymous post from a friendly neighborhood writer as part of Season 2 of our limited-run Hate Read pop-up newsletter. Make sure you’re subscribed to Deez Links to get ‘em all safely in your inbox, the better to hate-forward.You’re currently a free subscriber to Deez Links. For the full Deez, upgrade your subscription.
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