I’m a regular Netflix user and do sincerely appreciate the service. When you purposely choose not to have cable or satellite TV and do the cord cutter thing, Netflix is usually what most people choose to go with in combination with DTV.
Something I’ve found rather weird is Netflix’s inability to share anything outside of the site with any sort of automation. No buttons exist for “Share this movie with a friend” and there’s no social network connectivity. Zero social exists on Netflix.
Some of you might say, “Good! I like it that way!” I’m pretty sure you don’t. At bare minimum it would be nice to at least have an “email this movie to a friend” feature. And by the way, yes you can do this, but only the manual way and I’ll tell you how in a moment.
As I’ve come to discover, due to a 1980′s law it’s basically illegal for Netflix to allow the ability for people to share out their movie watching acitivity, and that’s why it doesn’t exist on the service.
On read of that blog article (and this one) by Netflix, the first thing you’re going to see is the date as it’s from 2011 and probably think, “Um.. hasn’t any forward progress been made?” Evidently not.
Yes, there is such a thing as a Facebook Netflix app, but all that does for US users is go straight to the Netflix interface and stay there; that’s all you get, so it’s worthless as a social tool.
So… we’re stuck sharing movies on Netflix the manual way, and here’s how to do that (at least from Windows or Mac):
Step 1. Login to Netflix, find a title and hover over it, then click the More Info link.
(ALTERNATIVE METHOD: Search for a title on Netflix, and when found, click it.)
Step 2. On the next page, copy the address out of your browser’s address bar.
Step 3. Paste that link into an email and send as you normally would.
Example link: http://movies.netflix.com/WiMovie/Office_Space/20358351?trkid=2361637
Whether logged into Netflix or not, the link will work. If you want to actually watch the title, yes you must be a Netflix member, but the point is that you can direct-link to titles in the Netflix system.
This is a roundabout way of doing it, but it’s better than nothing.
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The closest to social networking Netflix got was a couple of years ago
where they had a feature called “Friends”. It was removed some time ago.
When you get to that section, you were able to link your friends’
accounts and the system would compare your taste against your friend and
provide a percentage of compatibility. It would also show which movies
you would want to see based on your friends’ percentage. I really liked
that feature, but they killed it. According to customer service they
killed it because of technical difficulties. Not really sure what that
means. That section did utilize AJAX very heavily, but not to the extend
that they would have issues I’d imagine. I thought of making an app
similar in this functionality, but according to their API, they are not providing any data.
So Hulu can do it (heavily, I might add), but Netflix cannot? That doesn’t make sense to me.
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