Popular streaming services like Netflix make it challenging to find films older than a few years. As these services increasingly dominate our movie watching time, fewer will be watching older movies. The net effect accelerates an already on the rise movie monoculture dominated by Disney, DC, and Fast and Furious. Fewer films that aren’t blockbuster franchises get made.
The problem starts with streaming service UI patterns, most of which have the same opening interface: a big highlighted promo area up top, followed by long rows of thumbnail content segmented into categories. As I wrote earlier, categorization in the rows can feel arbitrary. Navigating through a single row requires too much horizontal scrolling. In addition, the promo area dominates the visual hierarchy but rarely offers more than a single movie or TV series at a time.
So streaming UI makes browsing dicey for any film. Considering older films tend to be a fraction of the content on the opening page, they, in turn, become exponentially more difficult to find.
Opinions around Microsoft’s 90 minute Xbox & Bethesda E3 showcase are positive, a highlight alongside Nintendo’s outing in an otherwise quiet E3 year. But there have been pockets of criticism around the show’s lack of depth and “wow factor.” VG247 argued there were not enough “next-gen show stoppers”. Threads on Resetera, social media, and Digital Foundry knocked the Xbox presentation for having too many CGI trailers.
I’m sympathetic to missing more hands on time with Microsoft’s upcoming lineup. However, much of this “depth” criticism is myopic, relevant to an earlier era where Microsoft’s core focus was on the number of games and consoles sold. Thirty trailers in ninety minutes may not be an optimal pitch for $70 games and $500 consoles. However, it is a very sound approach to push Game Pass.
E3 2021 has made it abundantly clear that Microsoft has bet Xbox’s future on subscriptions. Keeping gamers hooked on Game Pass is a different, tricker pitch than buying high profile games. Variety is a must, with enough titles and genres to attract a wide variety of subscribers. Quantity can also help. Not every game will interest a potential subscriber, but the feeling that many more games are coming to the service over time adds to its sense of value.
How we get from one TV episode to the next on your streaming service of choice requires finesse. The right design pattern saves time through less menu navigation once you reach the end of an episode. But too aggressive of a yank to the next show generates a hurried feel, giving you barely a breath to process what you watched before zooming off to the next show.
The services I subscribe to today – Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney Plus, Apple TV Plus – take different approaches to this next episode design challenge. All but Disney Plus have an algorithm that detects when you’ve finished an episode, generally the moment the closing credits begin to roll. At that point, UI appears to suggest moving on to the next show. This feature ensures I get the correct episode when I pick back up the series later.
Disney has no next episode detection and no corresponding UI at the episode’s natural endpoint. Continuing the “latest” episode of a show usually drops me midway through the previous episode’s credits. The net effect means I have to manually browse to get to the next episode.
I’ve previously written Xbox Game Pass off as a poor fit for my busy schedule. I’m someone who rarely has more than an hour or two to play in one sitting and saw the service valuing quantity over quality. To my logic, instead of paying $15 a month for a lot of games I would never have time to play, I’d rather buy what interested me directly, without being restricted to the selection available on Game Pass.
But a few weeks ago, I pulled the trigger on an unexpected in stock Xbox Series X on impulse. A month later, having sampled many titles on Game Pass, it’s clear my initial hunch was wrong. Game Pass has ended up saving, not wasting, my time. I feel more engaged with my tastes and I have a better sense of where I’ll spend money on gaming a la carte in the future.
That’s because Game Pass games are effectively demos on steroids. There’s no barrier to entry; I can explore as much or as little of any game on the service. If a game isn’t working for me, I delete it and move on. Thanks to a fast fiber internet connection, the wait for that next game is rarely long; to date, I have multiple downloaded games “on deck” for this purpose. Over some time far shorter than it would take to complete your average AAA blockbuster I’ve trimmed my playlist to a handful of games that resonate with me.
Engineering teams working together in the same physical space every weekday will be a rarity. Fully remote and flex work was a phenomenon on the rise before 2020, and the pandemic exponentially accelerated these trends. Tech firms had to adopt a work from home culture overnight. After some initial growing pains, most companies found their productivity didn’t tank, and many of their engineers weren’t eager to head back to their open floor plan campuses. Today even companies with a strong office culture (Google, Microsoft, Salesforce) have shifted to a hybrid setup with the workweek split between the office and elsewhere. Other high profile tech companies (Square, Twitter, Shopify, Facebook) now allow employees to work fully remote.
There will be some holdouts like Apple that retain an in-office model. Still, momentum favors more distributed work setups over time. This new reality makes remote team management skills not just nice to have, but essential.
Having managed a team across the U.S. and Canada for several years, it can be challenging to keep meetings productive and helping the team gel together. If you’re read or listened to any other remote first advice, this isn’t revelatory news. But your actions in response to these headwinds can have a positive impact.
The pandemic has upended movie watching. Our theaters are now our homes, with streaming services like Netflix and HBO Max our de facto movie watching hubs. Even long after COVID-19 is behind us, film distribution will not revert to the way it was in 2019. Brick and mortar theaters stay in shambles. Premium VOD will be untenable. Subscription services increasingly dominate.
Paradoxically, a movie watching landscape under the control of new technology can make finding content to match your tastes more difficult. Algorithms are not the answer. Instead, you’ll have to use some proactiveness and legwork to find your next great film.
That’s because almost every streaming service makes hunting for good content an ordeal. So much content can appear at once. Most services are intentionally obtuse with the details and it’s hard to know when a service adds or removes movies. Categorization can feel vague, misleading, and manipulative. A service will happily pay inflated prices for critically acclaimed festival winners and then proceed to bury them off the home page.
Xbox has been on a news tear lately. In early March, Xbox head Phil Spencer confirmed future Bethesda titles would only appear on platforms that offer Game Pass (read, not the PS5.) Days later, Square Enix revealed that the high profile action game Outriders would release on Game Pass in parallel with a full price retail rollout on other platforms. This one two punch crystalizes the biggest challenge to PlayStation’s market leader status. Sony has built a strong reputation on its platform exclusives, but the next Fallout or Elder Scrolls absent on PS5 will push many to Xbox this generation. Also, as Sony continues to press on with its $70 first party titles, Xbox Game Pass offering tentpole games at $15 a month looks increasingly tempting.
I hope this flood of recent Xbox news serves as a wake-up call to Sony. As Xbox differentiates itself from Game Pass, Nintendo on portability, and evergreen first party IP, Sony has some work to define its future direction.
In many ways that hook is a continuation of what Sony has done from the PS4 era: a curated collection of high caliber games that run exclusively, earlier, or best on PlayStation hardware. But that doesn’t mean a repeat of the same strategy from seven years ago. In 2013, well timed big budget exclusives could be the deciding factor, marketed through traditional channels on enthusiast websites, social media, and the occasional TV spot. Today we’re looking at an audience expecting more genre diversity, variety of price points, all while being fragmented across the internet.
Every console generation begins with a slow trickle of game releases as developers transition to new hardware. The launch of the PS5 and Xbox Series consoles in November last year won’t break the trend; through mid 2021 there may be fewer than ten titles exclusive to the Series X and PS5 combined. Nevertheless, the pandemic’s impact and unique hardware of this console generation — lightning fast SSDs and wide backward compatibility — will make this a gaming year like none we’ve ever had. Consider the experience “old game plus” where gamers spend a lot of time playing what came before but in revitalized ways.
Regarding the unfamiliar and new, it’s already a bleak sign to see how few firm release dates we have on the calendar three months into the year. I expect the news will only get more dire over time; many if not most titles with a vague 2021 release date will get bumped back to 2022.
The PS5’s solid state drive (SSD) has upended my expectations of what a console can deliver. It’s a greatly underrated technology, one that’s generated countless online comparisons around load time but remains elusive to quantify until you experience the tech yourself.
Almost from the first evening I turned on the PS5 the fast SSD made an immediate difference. Sans any PS5 specific optimizations from developers, the load times across much of my backwards compatible PS4 library improved significantly. MLB The Show 20 and Everybody’s Golf shifted from menu to game in roughly half the time. With the former I could simulate ball games far faster than before, and in the latter load times between holes were non existent. My handful of PS5 specific games — Astro’s Playroom, Bugsnax, and Demon’s Souls — had even more impressive stats, able to shift from launching the game to active gameplay in under twenty seconds. The console itself boots from a cold off state to the main menu faster than my TV could turn on. Navigating the UI across games and settings is smooth and ultra responsive.
With Wonder Woman 1984 debuting here in Canada as a $30 CAD rental, I can’t help but consider the premium video on demand (VOD) market on shaky, unstable ground. Long term I suspect it’s more of a stopgap action out of studio desperation than viable future for movies.
At a glance it shouldn’t be this way. Premium VOD is a great value alternative to theaters. While VOD means the loss of a theater level screen and sound you avoid the time and coordination of commute, loud audience members, and pay a lot less. Here in Toronto, a $30 CAD rental matches two tickets at $15 a pop. Add in transportation costs and expensive concessions and there’s a significant savings with premium VOD. Also, by swapping out the theater middlemen in exchange for streaming distributors like Apple and Amazon, studios ensure a higher percentage of box office income from every sale.