Fired up my WDTV last night to watch a horror movie. Netflix however, had different ideas. “Goofy Comedies”? Check. “Visually Striking Movies”? Check. Gripping Crime TV Dramas"? You bet. But no horror movies. And no option to chose them. So I decided to chat with a support tech. What follows is excerpts from the chat:
DANTE: I’m watching Netflix through my WDTV Live, and I would like to watch a horror movie. But “Horror” is not one of the options. How can I navigate through to choose genres?
NETFLIX: What you can do is check out the Horror section from the website and add all the movies you’d like to see on the WDTV, then fool around in the taste preferences to mix them up! And rating more horror movies will definitely bring the Horror genre back in no time!
DANTE: So there is no way to just surf through a genre and then sub-genres on the WDTV?
NETFLIX: Right, devices have limited amount of space on them allotted to Netflix and tries not to take up all the space and severely slow the WD streamer down.
DANTE: I don’t understand what you mean by the device having a limited amount of space allotted to Netflix. Can you elaborate?
NETFLIX: On the computer you can browse through all the genre selections and even sub genres but not on WD devices, nor any other device like PS3 or even Smart TV’s, and that’s because of the app that Netflix uses, it accesses the servers but can not put all the information onto those devices at once
NETFLIX: Not enough memory, too much data for one to handle, if you will.
DANTE: The WDTV is showing me 36 rows of movies, from “Comedies” to “Movies with a Strong Female Lead”. Each row has up to 75 movies. Let’s say an average of 50 movies though. That’s 1,800 movies. Probably some repeats though, so let’s call it 1,000, just to be safe. How many horror movies are currently in Netflix’s catalog?
NETFLIX: Let me take a look here
NETFLIX: 198!
DANTE: I don’t understand how moving through genre to genre is MORE memory intensive than showing me a list of 1,000 movies (none of which are ones I want to see right now).
DANTE: My point being, why can I not choose amongst ALL the movies I’m paying a monthly fee to access?
NETFLIX: I totally know where you’re coming from, and believe me it is baffling that not all the genres are available on certain devices, heck all I see on my PS3 are “because you watched” genres, It shows you the genres that you have been recently watching movies from in some way.
So my question is, am I being told the truth, or is it basically Netflix’s way of saying “You’ll watch what we damn well tell you!”