| Let me preface this by admitting that I'm a very poor judge of video quality since I generally think those 720p/700MB torrent encodes are swell. So I'm going to ignore the matter of video quality; by my awful standards they're both perfectly adequate. I think Amazon has Netflix beat on UX. To search Netflix without using third party tools is a real nightmare. The user interface seems user-hostile, like it's designed to conceal from the user the true breadth of Netflix's library (I earnestly believe it was.) It wasn't always this bad, in the early days of netflix's streaming business the search wasn't bad, and back when they were a DVD service (which is when I first subscribed) the search functionality was pretty decent even. But with Amazon video, you've got the search features built into the amazon prime apps, which admittedly usually sucks, but you've also got the option of searching on amazon.com itself, or on IMDB (which has been owned by Amazon since the late 90s.) Searching on IMDB is what I do. When doing advanced searches you can specify that you're only interested in movies that are free on amazon prime in your region. E.g.: Feature Action movies that are free on Amazon Prime in the US, and are in the IMDB Top 1000: https://www.imdb.com/search/title/?title_type=feature&genres... (Perhaps IMDB advanced search for prime videos is bad UX for casual users (although it was my non-technical mother who brought my attention to it, so I'd push back against that notion) but at the very least it's an option. While I've seen third party websites offering a good proper advanced search of Netflix's catalogue, as far as I know if you stick to Netflix operated search interfaces you're basically stuck up shit creek.) |
When I do watch things on the TV from a distance, it's important for the content preview images to be large enough and the spacing between rows of content preview images appropriate (fonts and font sizes also matter). On both Amazon Prime Video and Hotstar, I find the preview images and the layout to be cluttered and much smaller than expected. Reading content titles is quite difficult. It gets worse because both Amazon Prime Video and Hotstar have a lot more Indian content, but they tend to display the title transliterated in English while the poster has the title in the original language (which is small). This makes it difficult to read the text in the Indian language's script (transliterated titles can only help to some extent).
Amazon Prime Video and Hotstar also seem to load information on opened shows/movies slower compared to Netflix. I have a fast connection (40Mbps) with almost nothing else going on most of the time. So Netflix is doing something better in these areas.
Of course, like others have mentioned, I hate the Netflix auto-playing trailers for the currently selected show or movie. That's certainly very annoying and a ding on the Netflix UX.