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Netflix Will Now Interrupt Series Binges With Video Ads for its Other Series

posted by janrinok on Sunday August 19 2018, @10:04PM   Printer-friendly
from the we-interrupt-this-binge-to-bring-you-another-binge dept.

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Fnord666

The news emerged via user reports, particularly on the primary Netflix Reddit community, in which users claimed that ads for entirely different series would play between episodes of a given show's binging. One initial claim said that "unskippable" ads for the AMC series Better Call Saul appeared between episodes of Rick & Morty and that this ad appeared while using Netflix's smart TV app on an LG set in the UK. Replies to that thread included an allegation that a video ad for I Am A Killer (a Netflix-produced true-crime series) appeared between episodes of the animated comedy Bob's Burgers.

An American Netflix user offered more details for exactly how the ads appear:

After the episode ended, I got a screen saying "More Shameless up next... " then the title card slid off screen, and it continued with, "but first check out Insatiable" [a Netflix-exclusive series] and started playing the trailer.

In a statement given to Ars Technica, Netflix described the change as follows: "We are testing whether surfacing recommendations between episodes helps members discover stories they will enjoy faster." The reasoning, Netflix's statement says, comes from its last controversial decision: to add auto-playing videos, complete with unmuteable audio, while browsing through Netflix content.

Netflix offered a major rebuttal to at least one Reddit claim, pointing out that the ads for Netflix content are entirely skippable.

Source: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018/08/netflix-begins-testing-ads-for-its-own-series-between-binge-season-episodes/

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 20 2018, @06:34PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 20 2018, @06:34PM (#723863)

    Yup, they really did. I still use it to watch a few things, but the ad-autoplay mis-feature is really, really annoying, and I've found I watch Netflix a lot less than I used to, and when I thought about it, I realized it was because I dread those things starting on their own, so I browse their content less, which means I watch their content less. Now unless Roku search takes me directly to something on Netflix, I pretty much don't watch it at all.