Picture: Alamy
As we’ve extensively covered over the last few months, Netflix is in the middle of a massive identity shift. In case it wasn’t obvious from our recent dive into the platform’s newly minted “Podcast Era” or the rollout of the massive ‘Culture Edit’ hub, Netflix is gunning, harder than any year before, for YouTube.
By throwing tens of millions at Spotify crossovers like Jay Shetty’s On Purpose, licensing library titles from The Ringer and Barstool, and integrating over 5,800 episodes of short-form digital series from publishers like Condé Nast, BuzzFeed, and Tastemade, with that episode count already ticking up every single day, Netflix wants to be part of your entire day. They don’t just want your 8 PM Friday movie night; they want your 8 AM morning commute and your 1 PM lunch break.
But there’s a glaring problem with this YouTube-sized ambition. If you want to compete with YouTube, Spotify and others, but particularly YouTube, you need the tech to back it up. And right now, Netflix’s app is proving it is severely unprepared for this revolution, and that’s not its fault. While Netflix has to adapt to its new type of content, which differs greatly from just traditional movies or TV series, other platforms were always built to house anything and everything.
While things like background listening on mobile is a pain, the biggest problem right now is how podcasts and Culture Edit videos (ie YouTube content) are displayed, discovered, and found within the apps, which likely is holding the initiative back.
Netflix’s Mobile App Is Best For The Revolution So Far
Let’s start with the good: Netflix’s mobile app is clearly better suited than the TV and especially web version of Netflix. The Culture Edit hub on there actually lists individual episodes (something Netflix has had the ability to do on TV and mobile over the past year and does so for podcasts and even for kids’ episode collections), but this functionality isn’t available across devices.
We’ll come to the search functionality in a second, but there’s a reason why we’ll emphasize it soon enough. Especially on TV and web, browsing episodes of certain podcasts or YouTube collections, which can sometimes house over 300 episodes, is a laborious pain. Everything is shown in episode release order when you get to a show page, which is fine, but it’s not as effective as YouTube’s grid view by default, which is far easier to browse episodes.
The Great Search Dilution
So let’s get into it. The search functionality here is the biggest pain. As I noted in our previous coverage, searching for podcasts on Netflix is an absolute chore. The platform’s search architecture is built around overarching show titles, not individual episode topics, themes, or guests.
Let’s say you want to watch a specific Vanity Fair Lie Detector Test from the new Culture Edit collection, or you’re looking for a specific guest on a two-hour Bill Simmons Podcast. On YouTube or Spotify, you simply type the guest’s name into the search bar, and the exact episode pops up. Furthermore, you can go another route. If you’re on the Bill Simmons channel or page on Spotify, you can then do a search within all those episodes there.
On Netflix? Searching for an actor will prioritize their feature films, and maybe—if you’re lucky—flag a massive podcast where they are merely mentioned in the series description. You cannot effectively search through episodes. It forces the user to manually scroll down, parsing out dozens (sometimes hundreds) of episodes to eventually find what they want. It’s a UI nightmare and right now is only built for initial discovery or watching these podcasts as a TV show where you watch each episode in order, but that’s rarely, if ever, how people actually consume these types of content.
Netflix is actively testing out an AI search, and while I know it’ll get certain groans, AI contextualizing what you’re looking for and presenting search results based on that would actually be a pretty good use of this technology, in my opinion.
The Missed Franchise Synergy (Where is the IP connection?)
What was particularly interesting when The Culture Edit launched was how many shows had a Netflix connection in the picture associated with the title. Netflix loves using the word fandom, so that makes complete sense, but why aren’t these shows, particularly when episodes have Netflix-related talent involved, actually available on the show pages?
For example, let’s say I’ve just finished Wednesday. Netflix now has, buried away, at least probably a dozen episodes with Jenna Ortega or other related cast members and crew. Surely it’d make sense for a row to be present on the show page, similar to how it recommends other TV shows and movies, with all those episodes that provide a simple one-click way to get more out of a Netflix show.
Some of the companion podcasts, like the freshly minted ones for Bridgerton, One Piece, Peaky Blinders, and Heartstopper do show quite effortlessly, but again, Netflix needs to think deeper about individual episodes rather than the overarching title, and that’s just a function of how Netflix has been developed over its decade-plus history in serving titles that didn’t need to be thought of as individual episodes.
The clips functionality would really help with this too, but I’ll come to that in a second.
The Missing “Subscribe” Feature
The golden rule of daily or weekly episodic content on platforms like YouTube and Spotify is the ability to build a routine. You find a creator you like, you hit “Subscribe” or “Follow,” and the platform does the heavy lifting by notifying you the second a new drop happens, either through its algorithm or through more active means like push notifications, emails, or internal app notifications.
On Netflix, this basic functionality simply doesn’t exist for podcasts or short-form series. If you want to keep up with Good Mythical Morning (which joins the lineup in September) or the daily drops of The Breakfast Club, you essentially have to rely on the Netflix algorithm gracefully deciding to put it on your homepage, or manually search for it every time.
While you can add a show to “My List,” that system was built to track 10-episode prestige TV binges, not daily unscripted content. Netflix desperately needs a dedicated subscription feed and smart push notifications to build the daily habits that YouTube and Spotify have already mastered.
My Netflix, which was introduced with the big TV overhaul last year, sort of led with this promise of a very personalized hub, but it doesn’t seem like it’s fully living up to its original premise, at least in my eyes right now.
Netflix Clips Has Become A Podcast Feed But Should Be Evolved
Earlier this year, Netflix introduced its Clips functionality on mobile, and that’s been slowly rolling out around the world, but it’s becoming clear that, like TikTok, there need to be several different feeds. Whether it’s simply filtering between Culture Edit and Podcast or individual shows, right now it’s a little mangled and hard to know what exactly it’s trying to achieve.
Going back to what I was talking about earlier with extending Netflix IP and Discovery. Netflix should have a “Based on what you watch” (or a Following equivalent) where it gives you clips, podcast episodes, and culture edit videos based on titles you’ve seen or subscribed to (i.e., I’ve watched and finished Stranger Things, so I get shown an interview episode with Millie Bobby Brown) and a For You equivalent which is an algo feed that’s designed purely for discovery of new shows, podcasts, and anything else Netflix decides is relevant for me but I may have missed.
Will Netflix Fix It In Time?
If you caught my earlier piece on podcasts, I spoke about what phase of the lifecycle we are in: the “Golden Age” of a new initiative where they throw money and content at the wall to see what sticks. We saw it with Interactive Specials and the ill-fated AAA gaming studio “Team Blue”.
If Netflix is going to give this new YouTube and Spotify-inspired strategy a real chance to survive beyond an 18-to-24-month ticking clock, they have to marry their tech and new content quickly because it’s increasingly clear that shoehorning a completely different medium into an interface designed for television and movies isn’t going to work long-term, especially when people are used to consuming this content on other platforms they’ve been familiar with for over a decade.
Give us a real subscribe button. Fix the search bar. Tie the companion content directly to the IP. If they can’t build a platform that actually supports this kind of content, audiences are just going to close the app and go right back to YouTube.