Netflix’s Big Interface Revamp Gives More Info, Better Search, A Dash Of TikTok

Netflix today announced the biggest overhaul in more than a decade of its consumer interface, adding both a cleaner look and more information about each show, much smarter AI search tools that can understand fuzzy concepts such as a “vibe,” and a flexible structure that can better showcase the company’s burgeoning interest in video games, live events, sports and other new kinds of content.

And just to stay au courant, new vertical video components for mobile users will make it easier for fans to scroll through trailers and clips, watch the full show or share the material with others. It feels just a bit like the endless, and hugely successful, scroll of micro-video site TikTok, one of Netflix’s biggest competitors for audience view time.

“We think it’s time to take a giant leap forward,” said Netflix Chief Product Officer Eunice Kim. The new interface is “simpler, more intuitive, and better represents the breadth of entertainment available” on the company’s sprawling site.

“The current TV experience is built for shows and movies,” Kim said. “This is designed for the future.”

But Kim and Chief Technology Officer Elizabeth Stone said in a tech briefing that it was time for the interface to catch up with Netflix’s shifting array of programming, while making search more responsive and smarter. Also key: reducing the “eye gymnastics” that users must go through when scanning for information about a show. The cleaner look, with additional pertinent information on screen at a glance, should help simplify the decision-making process.

The new interface will be rolling out globally beginning today, Kim said.

Key shortcuts, such as the My Netflix tab, which features reminders and “continue watching” tabs, will now be displayed on the top of the screen, in a more prominent position.

In the past year, the company has moved aggressively into more live events and sports. It drew roughly 65 million viewers worldwide for an exhibition boxing match between influencer Jake Paul and aging former heavyweight champion Mike Tyson. That huge influx of viewers for one show strained Netflix’s servers, and caused complaints of glitches and service interruptions.

The Paul-Tyson streaming headaches last fall were largely solved several weeks later, when Netflix streamed two NFL regular-season football games without a hitch (or, admittedly, not anywhere near as many peak viewers).

But the company continues to increase its investments in live events, which require different network architectures to handle peak demand. As well, a live event typically comes from a specific location on the globe, but must be able to reach relatively quickly every corner of the planet where Netflix operates. Those demands will only increase.

Early this year, the company began showing WWE’s RAW weekly program, with its ardent fan base, and continues to do more live shows such as Everybody’s Live with John Mulaney, a revisionist weekly talk show. It also has extended its deal with the NFL, and is known to be looking at other kinds of live events and sports.

To accommodate those shifts into live sports and events, that means the interface needed a better reminder system to let interested viewers know, for instance, when an event is starting or reaching a crucial moment, Kim said.

“We need to let you know when to tune in to live games,” Kim said. “We need better ways to feature elements on the home page. And (the interface) needs to pull you into the thrill of watching or playing the show at exactly the right time.”

The company also needs to adjust to the demands video games, where it has slowly been growing its investments in increasingly sophisticated games that can be resource-intensive and hold a viewer’s attention for far longer than many shows.

To further adjust to the demands of live programming, Stone said the company will be adding more peak-demand capabilities to its long-time distribution backbone, called OpenConnect.

Helping audiences navigate seemingly endless program choices and quickly find something they’d like to watch is a challenge facing all the streaming services, especially as libraries grow and competition for viewers gets more difficult. Netflix has generally been considered one of the best in serving its 700 million or so audience members what they want.

The mobile interface is getting new ways to browse content, swiping up through a vertical feed and letting people browse clips and trailers. A new mobile feature called Moments will let viewers save, rewatch and share clips.

“All these features are about getting people to press play and to stay,” Kim said.

The new search functions will move beyond the machine-learning tools the company has used for several years. With those, the algorithm basically says because someone liked one show, here are some other shows that other fans of that show also liked.

The company is exploring ways to use generative AI and responsive search tools to pull in “more signals, so we can do a better job with titles you might love,” Stone said. “It will just be magically easier to find something to watch.”

Generative AI tools will be able to use “natural conversational phrases, like ‘I want something upbeat and funny,’” to serve up options with that kind of vibe. Recommendations will be highly personalized, Stone said, giving a comparison between her list of recommended shows and those of Kim as an example of two relatively similarly situated professional women living in the Bay Area might have very different tastes.

“It’s not exactly what you’d expect,” Stone said of their differing programming preferences. “We’re both tech nerds living in Silicon Valley.” But if the search engine kept recommending the same set of shows to both, “eventually we’d be frustrated and go somewhere else.”

For the company’s hundreds of millions of international viewers, AI will also generate personalized title information for more languages around the world.

In late April, the company introduced a subtle option for viewers opting to watch a show with subtitles in the original language, so that it will only show the translations of spoken dialogue rather than versions of sound effects, music cues, and other audio information that’s part of Subtitles for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing, or SDH. It debuted with the launch of Season 5 of the serial killer series You, and will roll out across all Netflix originals going forward.

Somewhat surprisingly, the new interface won’t really show anything different, at least initially, to viewers on its new-ish ad-supported basic tier compared to those on more expensive ad-free offerings, Kim said.

“We hope this makes both members and advertisers excited about Netflix,” Stone said.