[jk7tarYZAQNpTQa]

> The one thing I agree with is that scrolling through Amazon Prime / Netflix is a draining & dissatisfying experience

But not (only) because they lack a good catalog. It's mainly because they don't (want you to) have the tools to find content you'd truly like. They're focused on promoting new and trending content. The proper approach is to have a list outside content providers and not use providers as discovery tools. (Edited a typo.)

[xemdetia]

You need an external list anyway just to keep track of where things moved around to across subscription services. I wouldn't mind the current segmented streaming market as much if the people that are selling their media rights around provider to provider would do any effort to guide your eyeballs to their work, but they don't seem to be incentivized to do that and would rather direct you to a buy/rent situation instead which makes the whole streaming subscription piece redundant. Right now nobody's running the job as the promoter where they do an end to end hype train, it feels like everyone's just leaning on passive advertising and waiting to sell media rights to the next group. With the direct to consumer digital media purchase option only becoming more prevalent it seems like the subscription movies are going to be in purgatory for a very long time.

[kej]

>The proper approach is to have a list outside content providers and use not use providers as discovery tools.

As an aside, justwatch.com (and their mobile app) do a good job of filling this role. They have the same "promote the stuff that's already trending" problem, but will recommend things across services or that aren't available for streaming but you might want to track down anyway. (No affiliation beyond being a happy user)

[teawrecks]

This is why I believe it should be a legal requirement for digital storefronts to have an API that allows 3rd parties to create custom UI for them. I understand that they want to have marketing control over their content, but as a result we're creating an objectively worse experience for customers with no way for competition to step in a solve it.

[mypalmike]

When Amazon Prime video first came out, the catalog was extremely poor - I suspect they cheaply licensed a large library of old, obscure releases in order to have something to launch. But they also had simple, effective algorithms for content discovery as opposed to the herding algorithms of today. I seem to recall they even had a "random" categorization which seemed to be truly randomized and which was wonderfully hit or miss.