Browsing Netflix Movies
After signing up for the Netflix free trial, I was ready to browse the Netflix movies database to find the perfect movies for my first rentals. Little did I know this would turn out to be a somewhat daunting task. Netflix allows its customers to search through its expansive 25,000 movie titles via a myriad of classification—specific search, New Releases, Netflix Top 100, Critics’ Picks, as well as over 250 genre categories. It would have been much simpler if I had simply known what movies I wanted to rent. But I’m the kind of guy who goes to Blockbuster and looks around for 20 minutes deciding on what to rent. Of course, Blockbuster doesn’t have 25,000 movies for me to choose from like Netflix does. If you, too, like to look around before you decide on a movie, you might find yourself spending a lot of time in front of your computer.
Browsing Netflix Movies: More In Depth
If you already know the movies you want to rent, finding them is simple: you type the keywords into the search box and *poof* you’re done. I, on the other hand, did not know what I wanted to rent. So, I tried all the various ways to browse through their database including New Releases, Netflix Top 100, Critics’ Picks, and a category or two. The New Releases and Critics’ Picks pages were laid out in an almost identical fashion with a thumbnail image of the movie cover and a short description of it to the right. The movies seem somewhat scattered about the page and divided into sections left and right and top and bottom. This format works fine as long as there are a limited amount of movies to look at. The Netflix Top 100 was my favorite because it did not show the movie box thumbnails, but instead listed all the movies ranked against each other in one snug column going down the page. I was least impressed with general category browsing. The first page I ran into was set up like the Critics’ Picks page, with thumbnails and movies broken into even stranger categories. Only after browsing to the next page in the category did I arrive at a format that resembled something I would want from a wide-scale browsing search (more titles per page laid out in a less-cluttered format).
I thought by now Netflix would have the perfect site for browsing 25,000 titles...I came away somewhat dissatisfied
I'd reccommend that you go ahead and try the Netflix 2 week free trial. After you've given them 2 weeks, you can always drop them and try the GameZnFlix trial.