5 Features I Wish Netflix Would Copy From YouTube

I use YouTube Premium more than any other streaming service, which means there are certain great features of YouTube that I miss when I use other streaming services. In particular, I hope that Netflix will copy these five awesome YouTube features.

5

Episode and Movie Chapters

I had to double- and triple-check that Netflix doesn’t already have this feature—because surely it’s obvious, but unlike YouTube (and DVD’s from the 90s!) Netflix doesn’t offer chapters. You get to skip ahead ten seconds at a time, or scrub through the timeline.

Also, I guess, the option to skip intros and credits also counts as sort-of chapter skips, but I really wish I could jump to named chapters in shows and movies. Especially in non-fiction content like documentaries.

4

User-Generated Playlists

While it’s always been possible to create your own watchlist on Netflix, YouTube lets you create playlists and then share them publicly for other people to find. For example, if I look for classic sci-fi playlists on YouTube, I get these results.

It allows me to benefit from the time and effort put in by other YouTube users, which is an amazing way for me to discover content that I would never have scraped together through the normal search path.

Now, imagine if someone could do this on Netflix. What if I wanted to watch an anime with all the filler removed, or if I wanted to watch a certain movie series in chronological order in terms of the plot instead of in order of release? I’d love curated genre lists that are community-voted as well.

Maybe this takes too much control away from the all-powerful Netflix algorithm, but it would make me more likely to spend time on Netflix to see what people have put together.

3

Seeing Most Watched Segments of Movies and Shows

YouTube has a cool feature where some videos will show a graph where you can see which parts of that video are the most watched. The parts people skip to, and watch over and over again.

If we had that on Netflix, it would be an awesome way to see what parts of a program are the most interesting for whatever reason. Netflix already has the “Moments” feature where you can clip and share parts of programs you like. With a “most watched segment” feature, you’d know what other people were clipping for their social feeds.

OK, maybe this isn’t the highest-priority of feature requests, but I know Netflix already collects all this data for us, so why not share a little to give us some insight into the shows we watch?

2

Searching for Scenes or Lines

Google is, of course, known for its search technology—and YouTube benefits fully. I can’t confirm whether YouTube searches the content of subtitles or machine transcriptions to find content in videos, but in my experience with searching for things on YouTube, the search results are pretty nuanced.

I’d like it if Netflix included scenes or dialog in the search results. That would make it easier to find a scene where you don’t remember exactly which episode it was in or where. It would also make it easier to track down which shows a clip you saw on social media came from.

1

Ambient Mode

I love watching old Star Trek episodes on Netflix (yes we still get them over here, no Paramount app yet) and the majority of those shows aren’t in widescreen format, but instead in 4:3 aspect ratio. This means that you get two black pillars on the sides of the screen. Not the end of the world, right? However, I’m always paranoid that watching content with black bars is bad for my OLED TV, so I try to alternate. Not exactly the recipe for binging a show.

On YouTube, there’s something called “Ambient Mode” which simulates what those ambient backlights do for TVs by filling the black parts of the frame with a color gradient that matches the current movie frame. I like this effect overall, since it makes the video feel more immersive, but it would have the happy side effect of lowering the chances of solid lines burning into my TV. Sadly, even YouTube only offers this on Android and iOS devices in full-screen mode, so this is a case where I’d like YouTube to apply its own feature to its TV streaming app too!

Yes, I know that modern OLEDs are much less prone to burn-in, but it would make me feel better if nothing else, and I do like the effect in its own right.

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If we’re going to have a bunch of different streaming services with fragmented libraries, the least they can do is compete with each other on features and quality-of-life improvements. YouTube is essentially the streaming equivalent of community TV channels, so really it shouldn’t have better ideas than “premium” services, right? So Netflix, let’s have a few of those nice extras if you please.