To the best of my knowledge, there is now no way to see every title available in Netflix’s streaming library.
Until last week, browsing Netflix’s entire catalog was still possible, at least on a desktop web browser. You’d click “Movies” or “TV Shows” in the main menu, and then choose a genre from the options on the landing page. Within each genre, there was an option to switch to “Grid View,” instead of Netflix’s standard display of rows of titles grouped into categories based on sub-genres and users’ viewing habits.
Grid view showed users every single title grouped under each genre — and also offered the option to sort those titles either A to Z or Z to A, or in chronological order by year released. It was a very useful tool if you wanted to dig into Netflix’s catalog beyond the most recent originals the company was pushing at any given moment.
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It’s my preferred way to find things to watch on Netflix. Or at least it was until last week, when it suddenly vanished from their website. (The function has not been available on Netflix’s television and mobile apps for a while.) After a panicked cookie clearing didn’t bring the function back, I searched the web and found an article on What’s On Netflix confirming the streamer had “quietly removed” their sorting filters from their website earlier this month.
The site also offered a few reasons why they believed Netflix might unceremoniously drop something as seemingly important as being able to browse their entire catalog in a systematic fashion. They suggest that these features “were fairly niche and mainly for a few power users and not widely used by people discovering content on Netflix. They added that desktop usage in general “doesn’t play quite as big a role in Netflix’s viewing consumption,” with recent data suggesting that computers make up just 17 percent of Netflix’s streams (compared to 58 percent for televisions and 20 percent for smartphones).
While it might seem counterintuitive, What’s On Netflix also speculated that instead of guiding people to things they might want to watch, grid view and its lengthy array of options could instead have the opposite impact on viewership — “i.e. the longer you spend scrolling through a massive, static A-Z list, the more likely you are to close the app.”
That could be true. And it certainly wouldn’t surprise me to learn more people watch Netflix on their phones than devices with much larger screens. (It would depress me, but it wouldn’t surprise me.) Still, even if the percentage of Netflix users who took advantage of this sort and search function was small, removing it strikes me as a massive change — because it leaves viewers completely at the mercy of what Netflix wants them to watch and removes the customer’s freedom to browse digitally, the way people used to at brick-and-mortar video stores.
At an old school video store, you always knew exactly how many titles were available for rent or purchase; you could see them all as soon as you walked through the doors. You could go to the store with the express purpose of renting a specific title — say Robert Clouse’s 1985 action masterpiece Gymakta — or you could browse the shelves at your leisure. You might find a movie you never knew existed, or rediscover an old title you’d been meaning to revisit — like, say, Robert Clouse’s 1985 action masterpiece Gymkata.
As long as Netflix maintained that sortable grid view, they held on to something like the digital equivalent of those sorts of accidental revelation. There was a way to venture off the beaten path. Subscribers didn‘t need to limit their options to just the things Netflix pushed to the top of their apps. Now users are completely at the mercy of Netflix’s mysterious algorithms. If they’re in the mood to watch something that doesn’t jive with their prior viewing history or whatever’s popular on their service at a given moment, I truly do not know how they would find it. They can try third-party sites (What’s On Netflix that offer searchable Netflix databases. But how accurate or reliable they are is anybody’s guess.
The fact that I’d even compare Netflix to an antiquated concept like a physical space that rents physical copies of movies probably explains why the company felt comfortable making this change. Netflix is worried about competing with YouTube and TikTok, not replicating the video store experience. They’re in a bulk business; keeping and adding the most subscribers who consume the most content as possible. Catering to the tastes of weirdos like me who want to search for weirder, older, more obscure stuff is not a priority.
I get that. But I guess I just don’t understand why more people aren’t remotely curious about the depth and breadth of the films and television shows available to them. They’re the ones paying up to $26.99 for this service — hundreds of bucks every year. You would think they would want to get their money’s worth. More and more, the sense I get when I use my own Netflix account, is that this company does not want me to know what they have — or, more precisely, what they don’t have — so I have a tougher time making that mental calculation.
