Yes, the autoplay preview is very annoying, but I also find annoying the little information provided in the thumbnail gallery. To see more info about a title, you have to select the thumb to go to a full screen view of the title. Except now the actual video starts to play even though there is clearly a play button that was not clicked. At this point, all the play button does is hide the overlay. The buttons have no real meaning/purpose.
And I don't understand the economics of this at all. Don't they pay for bandwidth? Shoving out crap that no one asked for costs Netflix money, doesn't it?
So why do they do it? What's the business case? I know they aren't idiots over there. What do they know that the rest of us don't?
Are the content producers actually paying them to force-feed those previews?
This is the heart of the net neutrality debate, is it not? ISPs claim that Netflix doesn’t pay for all the infrastructure required to carry their bandwidth.
They don't pay for preferential treatment at the expense of other users -- and they shouldn't -- but they pay for the bandwidth they consume just like you and I have to. Otherwise we'd all have OC3840 connections running to our basements.
I doubt they're right, and/or I doubt they told you the truth. This feature actively impairs discoverability by putting the user in a Skinner box where they have to push a button, repeatedly, to make the negative conditioning stop. In my household, it mainly serves to make us "discover" what's on Amazon Prime Video instead.
Of course, many of Netflix's UI features have historically been engineered to make it hard to tell just how limited their selection really is, so autoplay does fit that pattern, at least.
