Me: Opens help chat with Netflix (there is no email option).
Chatbot: Title?
Me: Accessibility options for choosing shows

Chatbot: Sends links to irrelevant articles I already had to click past to get to the contact link.
Me: Clicks "chat with an agent".

(Opening handshake.)

Agent: Can you elaborate the issue that you are facing?

Me: When browsing shows, either on my TV or on your web site, you only show graphics for the shows. I don't see very well and the art is often hard to see, particularly if the show uses small or fancy fonts. Is there a way to see a text list? You used to have that for the web site (but not the TV) but that's been gone for a while. I do not want to have to hover over or navigate into each thing when browsing -- too many to do that. I'm looking for a way to scan a list of titles I can actually see.

Agent: The list is not available anymore

Me: Is there some accessibility setting I can change? It's really frustrating to not be able to navigate your offerings.

Agent: I understand, but there is no setting

Me: Thank you. I understand. How can I escalate my concern? I know that you cannot fix it but somebody at Netflix should be concerned about ADA/accessibility. How do I reach that person?

Agent: There is no one that can resolve it. I can pass on the suggestion and the feedback to our team. And they will look into it.

I suspect I know how that will go. I have the impression that all the streaming services are anti-accessible like this, though I've only done cursory browsing. They probably all think it's ok because everybody else does it. Netflix has had this problem for a while; I don't often use the service because of that, and every time I go to watch something I am reminded of how hostile it is. (In case you're wondering, my Netflix subscription comes bundled with something else; otherwise I probably would have dropped it by now because of this.)

Ho, hum. Did we need a second "love in the simulator" episode this season? On the other hand, watching a crew that's never seen cigarettes respond to them was amusing, in a kind of horrifying way.

I realize that every episode can't be grand arc stuff, but I'm hoping we'll see consequences from the last few episodes ripple through coming episodes, and I'm not confident we're going to get that. They've already missed one big opportunity there.

When this show is good it's very good, but there have been several "meh" episodes this season, as with the first season. I haven't been paying enough attention to know if there's a connection to writers of individual episodes.

The TiVo that I bought (used) 4.5 years ago is showing signs of malaise -- probably the hard drive (again) but it's hard to tell. This is my second TiVo and I'm not exactly enchanted by their subscription model -- required if you want program data, which is pretty essential for programming recordings, but when they say "lifetime subscription" they mean lifetime of the box. If I watched a lot of TV that might be worth the cost, but it's hard to justify for the amount I watch. And their monthly subscription is a non-starter; that's just a way to pay them even more money for the relatively small amount I watch. I'm also not enchanted by the tendency of their technical-support people to respond to every problem with "you should buy a new TiVo".

I'm looking for an alternative and appealing to my DW brain trust for suggestions.

Some specifics: ( Read more... )

Over the last few days I watched the Netflix show Between, which ran for two (six-episode) seasons. (It was a collaboration between them and some other studio.) When looking for some stuff about it online I came across several "where is season 3?" threads -- apparently they never formally cancelled it but the last episode came out in 2016.

I, on the other hand, am fully satisfied with the ending, and while there's definitely more story that they could tell, I think another season would feel like a bolt-on taking things in a different direction, kind of like that terrible telepath plotline that filled half of Babylon 5's fifth season. I'm glad they seem to have decided to leave well enough alone here.

Between is set in the fictional town of Pretty Lake (um, ok); they don't say where, but it feels like the midwest. (I thought Ohio because we see Mennonites, but a government official is Minister so-and-so, so maybe Canada?) A plague strikes, killing all the adults (and making me immediately think of Jeremiah), and the government quarantines them. The show takes place in the weeks that follow. Some of the characters start out rather two-dimensional, but we see growth, especially in the second season. There's the spoiled rich kid who sees himself as the natural person to lead the town now, and the smart kid who tries to figure out what's really going on (and learns he has a special connection), and the farm kid who turns out to be a paladin to the detriment of his younger sister, and the druggie and the brother who tries to protect him, and the gangs, and the pregnant teen with the sanctimonious sister, and the guy who's locked in prison when the outbreak hits. And there is the infrequently-glimpsed government that isn't playing straight, which plot develops more in the second season.

There's a saying, I can't remember where from, that civilization is seven meals away from breaking down into chaos. That's very evident here; we have a quarantined town that has only the food they had on hand, and the conflicts between the "I've got mine (and will defend it violently)" folks and the "we need to help everybody" folks (and the "we need to break out of here" folks). This town is full of teenagers, so we get the angst that goes with that too.

I found that I very much needed to suspend disbelief on the plague itself; without spoiling things, let me just say that so far as I know, biology doesn't work that way. No, really, some of this does not stand up to even minimal scrutiny. If you watch the show you just have to roll with that.

It's a decent show, not a great show; the characters take some time to settle in and the acting isn't great. For me that broader plot scenario laid an interesting-enough foundation, and there good strong moments and arcs within the larger show. It's about a 9-hour investment to watch the whole series, which I found worth it.

I've been thinking about updating my streaming. You can help. :-)

Apple TV (forthcoming) and Roku are both attractive and are clearly competitors. Both offer voice input, and "hey Siri, find $movie_title" would be way, way easier than using a remote control or phone to type a search, perhaps multiple times (once per channel/app). How well it works, and whether Siri will make it hard to find free alternatives to things in the Apple store, are open questions. I do not care one whit about playing games on my TV.

I have a first-edition Roku ("Roku 1", except it was just "Roku" then) and its user interface is pretty good, though I haven't gotten software updates for a year or two now (no longer supported) so I don't know what the modern UI looks like. One thing that I find annoying on my Roku is that you can only rewind or fast-forward in "steps" that are about 10-15 seconds apart, and when you jump it pauses to contemplate its navel before resuming (at which point you find out if you hit the spot you meant). So advancing to the end of the opening credits or backing up to hear that dialogue again is tedious and should be seamless. I much prefer the conventional rewind/fast-forward of my DVD and TiVo, where you see sped-up video as it goes by.

I mentioned TiVo, which streams. But TiVo's UI for streaming is really bad for people with less-than-stellar vision and measly little 42" TVs. If I can't read the titles from my chair, it's not very useful.

I also have a (new) Chromecast, an inexpensive experiment to see if that would do the job. I like it in principle, and you can't beat either the price or the footprint, but I've run into two issues. One is that it needs my phone's WiFi to be on and that sucks battery. That's probably livable because I keep a spare battery charged. The other is that Chromecast is only as good as the phone apps that drive it, and I really, really need a better Netflix app and haven't been able to find it.

The Netflix Android app is all about the eye candy. When viewing either my queue or search results, it shows me the cover art for each title -- but not the names in plain old text. Consider cover art, three to the row, scaled for a phone. I can't see that, and the app doesn't support zoom. I've found no setting to toggle between cover art and a text list. I've searched the app store for "Netflix" hoping to find third-party apps, but no luck so far. (By the way, the Crackle app has the same problem.)

Also, rewinding or fast-forwarding by moving a YouTube-style pointer really, really stinks. Netflix, where are the rewind/fast-forward buttons?

I'm mentioning Netflix a lot because that's really the only thing I stream from now. Roku has hundreds of channels but you have to interact with them individually, so I never do -- a unified search, on the other hand, would provide an entry to that. Since I'm already paying for Netflix I'm otherwise only interested in the free ones; I had thought that included Hulu but the phone app suggests that it's all paid now.

Dear readers who are technologically way ahead of me, any input?

The DVD player has apparently given up the ghost; it makes the right noises when I put a disc in, but it doesn't actually load it. I've tried several known-good discs. I've unplugged (which apparently worked for some people), but that didn't help. If it still won't read a disc tomorrow, I guess I get to buy a new one, since in our disposable-and-cheap-electronics era it's not worth paying someone to repair it. Amazon offers me a bunch of options, among which I'm not really sure how to best choose, in the $40 range.

My only hard requirements are that it be region-free so I can play my British DVDs (my precioussss) and that it play DVD-Rs. HDMI is helpful. And the remote shouldn't suck. I'll happily accept recommendations or anti-recommendations. The outgoing unit is a Philips that didn't last for as long as I think it should have.

We went to alaricmacconnal's and Elsbeth's yesterday for a New Year's Day party, which meant more gaming. I had fun playing more Dixit (blackpaladin, which expansions were in there?), and Dani played Constantinopolis, a resource-management game that sounded similar to Puerto Rico but is twice as long (or thereabouts). I haven't played it yet.

2013 was getting off to a great start but then I had to go back to work. Powerball, you have failed me. :-) (Ok, I've never actually bought my own lottery ticket, but when a group is forming at work I always buy in because I'd sure feel stupid if I didn't and half the company won buckets of money and left.)

Resolution? 1280x1024, but maybe I'll get a new monitor this year. (I think it was merle_ who inspired that idea.) Though I'd rather keep the aspect ratio I have now (i.e. I'm not so thrilled with the widescreen monitors that are all the rage these days).

Orlando is currently chasing his tail. I thought that was a dog thing. (He's got one white pixel on the end of it, but I don't think it's that in particular that he's chasing.) More generally, he and Giovanni seem to be settling in, though I still can't pick either up for more than a few seconds and I had only 50% success on last week's vet visit. Giovanni has gained a pound in the last month, so I guess Orlando isn't being as pushy about the food dishes as I thought.

Netflix only gives you about a week's notice when something is going to disappear from their streaming service. Last week I noticed that Farscape, which had been languishing there for a while, was slated to disappear, so I watched the first eight episodes to decide if I want to queue up DVDs. It looked to me like interesting characters and underwhelming plots, but I'm mindful that some good shows (like B5) took a while to settle in. To those who've seen it: does it get better?

Apparently I can't post comments on LJ tonight, so some of you will probably get some belated comments when that changes. Let's see if I can post an entry.

Netflix's business people may have their heads in anatomically-challenging places, but their customer support continues to be excellent. We recently ordered the first disc of a three-disc set (The 10th Kingdom). The sleeve proclaimed a running time of 4:25 and the DVD had a label on it. At around the three-hour mark play stopped with a directive to switch to side B.

This does not fit neatly into any of the categories of problem supported by their web site, so I called. I explained the problem to a friendly, sympathetic rep and said that since this is the first of a multi-disc set I have no way of knowing if I've seen everything that's supposed to be there -- yeah, it ended in the middle of the story, but you expect that. So I don't know if they have a problem with their discs or with the time labeling.

"Amanda" said she would send a replacement for that DVD (just in case the problem is a label on a two-sided disc, though that would be a manufacturer error) and also the next disc in the series so I can tell whether there seems to be anything missing in the story. I have the one-DVD-at-a-time plan, so I expected to have to do this in stages.

I've only had a few problems over the course of my Netflix membership, but they have all been handled well. I'm glad to see that's still true after their semi-restructuring.

Tangentially, how can I get GMail to stop treating my Netflix mail as spam? I would have thought that adding the relevant address to my contacts list (which I would otherwise never do) would suffice, but no. Nor did manually reclassifying a couple dozen messages as "not spam" make any difference; where's that "filter bubble" that delivers personalized results when you need it?

Followup: The second disc picks up right where the first left off. The error is not in the discs but in the labelled duration. I'm not sure how to get Netflix to fix that to avoid confusing future viewers.

To get my TiVo to shift out of DST I reboot it? Is that what I did last time and I managed to forget? There's no way to manually set the time, and apparently no less-invasive way to ask whomever it asks about the time to go do that. Weird.

Lately I've been having to reboot the TiVo once or twice a week to get it to stop losing part of the signal (sometimes it freezes video; other times it drops sound). So I guess I would have noticed this before too much longer. I don't know what the reduction in reliable uptime means -- aging hardware, dropped support for older models, gremlins, or what. But now I can stop adding an hour to recordings because of clock error, which is handy.

This comic, making the rounds on Google+, is spot-on.

Earlier this summer Netflix announced a 60% price increase for DVD+streaming, as they split the two services apart into separate subscriptions. This has forced me to do some thinking about whether I really use $8/month's worth of DVDs, but I haven't dropped that half of the plan just yet. Then yesterday I got email announcing that they are splitting the two services apart more completely -- two web sites, two billing records, two brands, two companies.

On the one hand perhaps it's just marketing spin; I've never claimed to really understand what goes on in the heads of people who do marketing for a living. But the change also lowers usability quite a bit. Currently I can manage two linked queues, moving items between them as availability changes (titles come and go on streaming all the time); now that will be more work. When something I have in my DVD queue becomes available for streaming it tells me; that probably won't happen in the new scheme. And currently I can rate things I've seen and that influences the suggestions I receive, which are good enough that I pay attention; now half my ratings would be on each site and the overall quality of recommendations will go way down.

If Netflix doesn't want to provide an integrated service any more they're free to do that, of course, but placing more stumbling-blocks before their customers so soon after the second price hike this year seems unwise. I think I will probably drop the DVD service now; it was marginal for an integrated service and is even less valuable for an un-integrated service. If it's not going to be integrated anyway, I may as well get DVDs from RedBox or somebody (nominations for "somebodies" who do TV series would be particularly welcome). Or, with the savings of $96/year, I can even buy a few and be ahead of the game.

They say they're not trying to kill off the DVD service, but I'm skeptical. I think the handwriting is already on the wall for a service that depends on the postal service -- longer mail-delivery times coming soon to a mailbox near you [1], combined with monthly pricing, means fewer DVDs for the price. If they spin it off into another company they can let that company fail without hurting the Netflix brand and streaming business. I've stuck with doomed companies to the end because they continued to provide a valuable service, but Netflix seems to be giving up on the "valuable service" part of that. What a pity.

[1] There are two factors here. First, of course, is the plan to eliminate one day of mail delivery, but the bigger factor is that the post office plans to close a bunch of mail-processing centers to consolidate operations, which they say will double the minimum delivery time for first-class mail to two days. So if you always watch a DVD the day (or weekend) it arrives and send it back the next morning, you'll be able to watch approximately one DVD per week.