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After a successful test pilot program beginning in July 2020, Netflix is moving “full steam ahead” with the launch of its Shuffle Play feature. This comes on the heels of good news for the media streaming provider in Q4 2020, such as an increased subscriber count to north of 200 million, an aggressive plan to roll out a minimum of 70 new movies this year, and no longer seeing “a need to raise external financing for our day-to-day operations.”
“It’s really working for us where our members can basically indicate to us that they just want to skip browsing entirely, click one button and we’ll pick a title for them just to instantly play,” COO and chief product officer Greg Peters shared on Netflix’s Q4 investor call Tuesday. “And that’s a great mechanism that’s worked quite well for members in that situation.”
And on the call, Co-CEO Reed Hastings humorously replied, “Greg, are we going to call it ‘I’m feeling lucky’ or are you going to come up with something better?”, in reference to Google’s own search feature that brings you a randomly selected search result.
The new function is meant to help more than only the indecisive viewer. The idea is to make viewers better aware of various programs they otherwise may not have considered or known were available – and to get them hooked.
Those kinds of results will make the investors happy since the price of Netflix’s high definition subscription is increasing, from $12.99 per month to $13.99 per month. And their premium plan is also getting bumped up from $15.99 per month to $17.99 per month, too.
But should you ever find yourself in a particular mood to yet don’t want to leave it all to chance, for the time being, you can punch some random numbers in your remote and see what comes up.
