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Netflix’s new UX fails the early anecdotal buzz test

A month ago, Netflix revealed a somewhat risky plan to overhaul a decade-old UX design that has helped it expand beyond 300 million users worldwide. While conceding the high level of difficulty in building a new user interface that will please a vast array of cultures, languages and tastes — not to mention the possibility of breaking something that was working just fine in the process — the streaming company insisted that the new UX had already been vigorously tested with select users worldwide.

As the Penske trades noticed last week, with the update starting to roll out first to LG and Samsung smart TV users, Netflix members are taking to Reddit, and the early buzz about about the new UX, anecdotal as it might be, isn’t great.

In that same Reddit thread, several users wondered if, while wandering the forest of KPIs, Netflix may have missed a few trees.

Damning leaks from Netflix’s tests actually emerged on Reddit as far back as nine months ago. Certainly, Netflix saw this feedback, but nonetheless felt confident to publish the update, anyway.

— Daniel Frankel

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Next TMT: WBD’s debt-strapped linear spinoff faces a tough climb, and we check in on Apple’s (still-alive) Vision Pro dream at the WWDC

Our weekly text exchange between veteran reporters David Bloom and Daniel Frankel also recaps a big B2B media and entertainment event that’s actually growing

FRANKEL: Not only were you right there with me as Next TMT handled the short-form video interviews and daily newsletter for the surprisingly massive StreamTV Show here just outside Denver, I suspect many Next TMT subscribers were there, too, and have already seen the prodigious project we were covering. So Dave, I won’t belabor the point, except to say, wow, what a B2B event Kevin Gray and Questex put together. In my nearly three-decade business-reporting career, tech, media and telecom trade shows have always reminded me of Douglas Coupland’s opening passages to Generation X, where he describes being too late to the proverbial beach party. From Comdex to Internet World, VSDA to NATPE, ShowWest to The Cable Show, SCTE to NAB, I was always catching big trade events well after their peak years, diminished by industry consolidation, technological obsolescence, pandemics and the world just plain movin’ on. Amid so much … death, it was really good to be around new life. Along with StreamTV’s nearly 2,000 attendees, we caught a growing, multi-day B2B shindig on the rise. Besides the fact that it seemed like everyone was there, the secret sauce might be the marketing. From the “puppy park” and goat yoga to unofficial event “spokesman” Earl (played by local talent Logan Daley, an undiscovered comedy-improv country, in the humble opinion of this former Variety “10-Comics-to-Watch” editor), Gray and his team seem to have a lot of fun with this. It’s a playful edge that carried through to the loose atmosphere at Aurora, Colo.’s sprawling Gaylord Rockies Resort & Convention Center.

BLOOM: Good show, great work, glad we were invited to the party. The StreamTV Studio page on YouTube, and soon the show’s website, feature nearly 50 short video interviews, chat shows, and more from executives, analysts, journalists and others. I strongly recommend taking a peek, while also leveraging YouTube’s increasingly essential playlist function. As the kids say, subscribe and like. While we were busy StreamTV-ing, streaming TV kept moving forward-ish. Most notable was Warner Bros. Discovery’s wholly expected but still-momentous breakup announcement. ShitCo 2 joins Versant on the ice floe drifting out to sea. The production studios and non-Discovery streaming services remain to ensure David Zaslav can still get into Sun Valley next summer. Several deal bits caught my eye:

• CFO Gunnar Wiedenfels will head the doomed linear cable networks unit, taking most of WBD’s cash flow, a 20% stake in the way-cooler studios & streaming unit, and much of WBD’s $34 billion in debt. That’s a lot of owing to pile onto fading assets with no obvious growth path.

• This is very bad news for CNN, whose ‘00s-era cost structures are even more out of whack in a shrinking company like SpinCo 2. The Grim Wiedzer knows what to do to right the floe, but the right-sizing won’t be pretty for lovers of journalism, or even sausage. I wonder how long Mark Thompson, Jake Tapper, or Anderson Cooper stick around.

• SpinCo 2 is supposed to dispose of its 20% CoolCo stake in the first year after the split, but how does that impact future deals for the rest of CoolCo?

• To make even this deal happen, will CNN have to be jettisoned completely to quell the deeply felt DEI concerns of FCC Chairman/MAGA nepo baby Brendan Carr?

• And will Zaslav, of course retaining his mogul status while heading an ever-shrinking media company, ever deliver on any of the promises he’s made to shareholders beyond stolidly reducing debt levels and creative expectations? LightShed Partners’ Rich Greenfield has regularly chronicled Zaslav’s missed EBITDA promises and subsequent consequences: “While a never-ending global pandemic followed by a rare double Hollywood strike could not have been predicted or modeled, WBD has nonetheless failed to meet its original financial expectations, an underperformance reflected in the precipitous drop in its stock price since the merger was announced.” That’s from $24 a share three years ago to around $10 now. “Splitting WBD into two parts does not ensure value creation and while financial engineering can create value for investors, it also introduces new risks that investors need to consider,” Greenfield wrote. This could bomb too.

• How many investors will bet on a big-money acquisition of CoolCo at time when big money may be focused on AI and immersive entertainment? Will anyone want to buy this turd blossom at the premium price some seem to think it should command?At StreamTV, Needham & Co.’s Laura Martin suggested streaming companies must be more like YouTube (premium-meets-UGC) or Amazon (e-commerce and a bunch else) for Wall Street to care. I don’t see any of that happening with CoolCo or SpinCo 2.

FRANKEL: Certainly, YouTube’s growing dominance was StreamTV’s No. 1 topic. I’ve talked to a lot of streaming tech vendors, including last week, who advise their clients to pivot to short-form, YouTube-like programming … as if they could possibly compete with YouTube’s vast ecosystem of flora and fauna while churning out bite-sized, AI-produced shows. The often-provocative TMT consultant Jeffrey Gilbert suggested that just because it’s now consumed through connected TV, YouTube — as a provider of “uncurated” streaming — shouldn’t be compared to SVODs and FASTs. YouTube, Gilbert argues, should be in a separate not-TV bucket. He rejiggered Nielsen’s Gauge tracker, reflecting what he believes is a more useful snapshot of U.S. screen usage. “TV is curated. YouTube is not,” Gilbert wrote on LinkedIn. “Anyone can post anything on YouTube. Not so on broadcast, cable or other streamers.”

BLOOM: Curation as difference maker is an interesting point, but ignores the real issue: where the eyeballs are, and aren’t. Speaking of eyeballs otherwise directed, other bits of TV business emerged this week. First-round voting on Primetime Emmys began. Any early contenders? I know you loved The Pitt and MobLand. Perhaps Noah Wyle and Tom Hardy get an acting nod? Hacks’ Jean Smart et al feel headed for another batch of comedy noms, even if the Max original will be on HBO Max before final voting wraps. Can Disney+’s enormously budgeted Andor, which is so much more than a Star Wars side quest, get TV Academy notice for its many great actors. Will lame Emmy voters once again overstuff ballots with White Lotus performers, even in a down year? Given Severance’s cultural ubiquity, it seems primed for a big haul. Netflix almost certainly will score with the harrowing Adolescence, though I wonder if The Residence, Zero Day or my new favorite, Department Q, get noticed, presuming they’re eligible. Something in the Taylor Sheridan-verse surely will get love, despite our churning political cross-currents, whether it’s Yellowstone’s final season, Lioness, newcomer Landman, or 1923.

FRANKEL: I’ll say it again: nobody in television is consistently producing more interesting-to-watch television than Sheridan and Paramount are these days. Then again, the orange chicken at Panda Express can be interesting to eat on road trips, but I’m not sure it should draw consideration for culinary kudos. You want an example of “talking down” to viewers? T.S. proves the far right can do a pretty good job of it, too, with Landman. Take Billy Bob Thornton’s sanctimonious, Big Oil propaganda spiel below as a prime example. I hope Emmy is careful not to put its still-powerful stamp on this pretentious, mis-informative soap opera full of one-dimensional characters … that I very much enjoyed watching. Separately, it missed Emmy’s 2025 eligibility window by five days, premiering June 4, but I really enjoyed episode 1 of Apple TV+’s new Owen Wilson series Stick.

BLOOM: Just in time to not really influence Emmy voting, the Television Critics Association has a new board of directors. Congrats to the electees, steering an organization traditionally devoted to group stenographic junketeering. But I couldn’t help being struck by the absolute anonymity of organizations represented among TCA’s leadership: New President Andy Dehnart’s reality blurred? Liz Shannon Miller’s Consequence? The reliably neurasthenic Kevin Fallon with the Daily Beast’s Obsessed? Perhaps, ahem, the callow founders of newly hatched Next TMT shouldn’t cast stones here. And true, many TCA board members have written about TV for decades, with previous stops in previously impressive outlets. But the remaining hidey-holes left for many TV critics are their own sad commentary on TV criticism’s collapse, at a time when there’s more TV to criticize, celebrate, discover and disparage than ever.

FRANKEL: A lot of those digital pubs have been around from years and are pretty well known in within the TV business. And many of them are backed by the same critics who’ve been around for years. Like us, they’ve been forced to go out on their own as publishing has largely collapsed. But I’ll concede that setting a bar has seemed challenging for TCA. I can recall attending their Pasadena summer tour 15 years ago, which attracted many trained, experienced TV critics who still worked for traditional newspaper, magazine and digital outlets. Even then, I thought TCA let too much amateurish Ain’t It Cool News-style fanboy riff raff through the door. Speaking of setting a bar with TV critics, at its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) last week, Apple released this graphic — based on aggregated critics review data compiled by Ampere Analysis — that showed Apple TV+ at the very top … and strangely, HBO and Max at the bottom.

BLOOM: Last Monday, Apple announced a bunch of not-very-exciting software developments at WWDC. Yawn. I was struck by the burgeoning company-wide influence of what many call a rare Apple flop, the Vision Pro, a $3,499 “spatial computing” device that’s extraordinarily capable but soooo not priced for the rest of us. The AVP, as we pioneering few owners like to call it, was inspiration for what execs said is their biggest device interface redesign in more than a decade. That seems important, even if many critics hate the Liquid Glass look. Days before the WWDC announcement, the first feature-length Apple Vision Pro movie, Bono’s Stories of Surrender (Immersive) debuted. Based on a stage version of Bono’s written memoir, the immersive version is something else entirely, even if his personal story can be unbearable for reflexive Bono haters. Creative director Elad Offer told me the team used every 3D, editing and visual software package out there, trying to build an efficient workflow for a new kind of experience. It was a pain. Now, though, he said the work should be much easier after Blackmagic Design delivers its Ursa Cine Immersive camera alongside DaVinci Resolve software for spatial video editing. Elsewhere, Charlotte Mikkelborg, the British showrunner behind the breathtaking AVP series Adventure, just finished the latest of several gut-churning immersive experiences featuring completely nuts extreme athletes. Her work is as close as I ever want to get to highlining 1,000 feet above a Norwegian fjord. Three years from now, lots of entertainment will look like this, on several companies’ devices. But it’s remarkable to see what Apple is doing with this “flop” of a device now.

FRANKEL: Just moving the ball around the ol’ StreamTV Show horn one last time. You and I had a rather interesting (albeit admittedly sponsored) sit-down with The Trade Desk’s Matthew Henick, the long-locks-ed former Facebook exec in charge of the adtech company’s new TVOS launch, Ventura. That whole interview can be heard in our weekly podcast, embedded at the top of this email and also accessible on Spotify. Also, I had to miss it, but Paul Bousted, part of the team behind Dolby’s OptiView live streaming and playback software, presented results of a new study focused on the live sports streaming industry (which I helped work on). While execs in charge of sports streaming are focused on improving such things as video latency and quality, they indicate that personalization and engagement features are the easiest to develop and deploy. More than 60% of execs surveyed said these same features could deliver the most revenue bang for the buck. That’s what’s called “low-hanging fruit.”