The One Feature Missing from Netflix

From the archive. Originally published on migmol.com on 2019-04-08, recovered and republished here in 2026 at its original address. Unedited except for formatting.

Almost everyone watches Netflix these days. It’s the undisputed global leader in streaming and even accounts for 15% of the world’s total internet bandwidth. That’s major. Global competitors like Amazon & Hulu are trying to catch up and media giants like Disney are getting ready to join the melee.

In terms of user experience, Netflix is on point. Smaller services and apps just lack the user understanding that Netflix has that makes browsing for things to watch so easy. Netflix even customizes each show’s thumbnail depending on the user, adapting the image to something that you may be interested in.

For all its excellence though, Netflix is still missing one essential feature that can take them to the next level: a social network.

Before you downplay this as another case to build a Facebook competitor, this is different because a Netflix social network is something that already exists, albeit offline.

Think about it, every time you meet up with friends or family, one topic always comes up for sure: “what are you bingeing”? Everyone then lists down what they’re currently obsessed with and tries to recruit fans to their cause. “You’ve got to watch it!!”, someone will inevitably exclaim. You then pull out your favorite note-taking app and add the shows that sound most promising before everyone ends up reflecting on their life choices with regard to how they spend their time, but we digress.

This social network doesn’t even have to do much. It can be quite simple. In its simplest form, it just needs to give users the ability to like certain shows (which already exists!) and then the ability to see what your friends are liking. It won’t share everything you’re watching with everyone, just the shows you want to share with your friends. If you know you have similar taste with a particular friend, you can check out what he/she is watching and start from there.

That’s it! Simple, useful, and echoes a natural behavior. Plus, it opens up Netflix to a whole new vertical that will provide useful to them in the future.

Google once tried to build a social network, but it just wanted to be just another Facebook and thus Google+ has ceased to exist. YouTube currently has some sort of way to share videos with friends through a messaging component, but not everyone who watches YouTube is logged in. Plus, although people do share a lot of YouTube content, somehow this isn’t part of real-life social chitchat as much as Netflix is.

Spotify currently has a seldom-used messaging component and if you’re not privy, it actually shows everyone on your network what you’re listening to (only on browser/desktop). It’s a stupid feature because it is turned on by default and they don’t talk much about it. I once found out a former colleague was pregnant because I saw she was listening to ‘Bach for babies’. But this Spotify service doesn’t work because Spotify isn’t as widespread as Netflix, the majority of Spotify users don’t pay for the service and don’t have access to music on demand, and the behavior of raving to your friends on what music you’re listening to exists but isn’t as commonplace as Netflix.

On Netflix, everyone has to be logged in to use the service, they have access to the whole library, and most important of all, people always talk about what they’re currently obsessed with. Perhaps the nature of bingeing creates obsession or fanaticism. The format of what is consumed affects how engaged people are which in turn elicits a unique social behavior. In short, only Netflix can pull this off.

A third-party application can do all of these things, but it needs access to Netflix API, which Netflix can just choose not to give, and for the user, a separate app is another step. To ensure adoption, the service has to be built right into Netflix.

The only drawback to this Netflix network is that we have one less thing to talk about when we do go out into the real world and try to be social. But come on, it’s not like we complain that we already know everything happening in our friends’ lives when we see them because we saw it on our feeds.