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by MBCook 3484 days ago
He wasn't wrong, it does add serious interface complexity.

But we all know that it's a very desirable feature and most people are willing to pay for that complexity to be able to watch offline.

So it was mostly spin, like Steve Jobs saying they'd never make a tablet at a point where it had to be in final development internally.
1 comments
JadeNB 3484 days ago
> He wasn't wrong, it does add serious interface complexity.

How? I don't have Netflix, but, for Amazon Video, you get a download button—that seems to be the only bit of the interface that reflects the ability to download at all. After that, you don't have to worry about whether you're watching a local or streamed copy; the movie plays just the same.

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MBCook 3484 days ago
It was "click on anything and it plays".

Now it's "click on anything and it plays. Unless your offline. Where search also doesn't work. And when you're offline you probably go somewhere else to see what you're looking for. When online we need to show that too. And buttons to let you download or see the download status. And....

I'm not saying it's insurmountable, but it's quite a bit more than the old "everything you see you can watch now and that's all there is to it" model.

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JadeNB 3484 days ago
> It was "click on anything and it plays".

> Now it's "click on anything and it plays. Unless your offline. Where search also doesn't work. And when you're offline you probably go somewhere else to see what you're looking for. When online we need to show that too. And buttons to let you download or see the download status. And....

But it seems that your 'before' is not quite right: if you can't download videos, then it's "click on anything and it plays, unless you're offline", full stop! That is, by allowing download of videos, a total-failure mode has been replaced by a mode with different functionality. Although it's technically true that "you can do some things" is more complicated than "you can't do anything", I'm not sure that it's really worse.

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MBCook 3484 days ago
No, because if you were off-line the app wouldn't let you in. The app set that condition clearly and enforced it. So there was no confusion, 'cause if you could see it you could play it.
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