Netflix Is Making This Major Change to Its Ratings Guide
Streaming service Netflix has become one of the biggest sources for entertainment around. Since the company’s humble beginnings as a mail-order DVD rental service (do you remember that?!), it’s become the leading source for new television, as well as cutting edge in terms of streaming. The service has become so iconic, that we even have a new reason for couple fights: Netflix cheating! While Netflix hasn’t changed much in terms of how we’ve used it since it first began offering streaming services, they’re now rolling out a major change to how we rate the shows and movies we watch, and they’ve taken a page from an internet giant to do so.
Rolling out over the next few months, Netflix is completely changing the way we see each program or movie’s ratings. They are dropping their five star rating system, and in its place, putting in a thumbs up or thumbs down icon. The Verge reported that in beta-testing this feature (which has been happening since last year), users got 200 percent better ratings results than the current system, which has, in turn, made Netflix want to roll this feature out much faster than it was planning. And that’s not to say people will be thrilled about it.
For its part, Netflix hopes that this change will actually be better for users than worse. They argue that with Facebook, simply clicking on the thumbs up icon gives users a stronger connection to the media they are interacting with. Their hope is that doing the same thing on Netflix will have the same effect. The end goal is to have a stronger emotional connection both with the programming and the service overall. Whether or not that will happen remains to be seen, however.
You can expect to see the ratings change on your account starting some time in April, and rolling through until everyone’s accounts have the new ratings in place.
Do you think the thumbs up will result in better Netflix user experience? Tell us @BritandCo!
(h/t Teen Vogue; Photo via Phillip Faraone/Getty)