Netflix overhauls its home screen for the first time in 12 years

Los Gatos: The most powerful home page in entertainment is about to look a lot different.

Beginning next week, Netflix will introduce a new home page design for television screens, the company's first serious makeover since 2013. The redesign, which features fewer titles but more video and animation, is intended to present a sleeker look and get "people to press play, and stay," the company said.

The last time Netflix debuted a major home page redesign, the streaming service had just over 30 million subscribers and was only starting to make its own original programs. It now has more than 300 million subscribers, has released thousands of original TV shows and movies and has remade the entire entertainment industry in its streaming image.

It's a moment that the company is marketing as "the new Netflix."

The new home page will have a navigation bar across the top of the screen, instead of being tucked away on the left side, as it has been. It will also feature what executives are calling "responsive recommendations," which will serve titles on the home page based on what the subscriber has been searching for in near-real time. (Looking for horror? Here come a lot more horror recommendations.) And the new TV home page will have the ability to more prominently feature its new content types, like live programming.

"The real goal of this is, how do we make it easier, how do we make it simpler, faster for you to make a great decision?" Greg Peters, a co-CEO of the company, said in an interview.

The redesign will start rolling out for all subscribers in the coming weeks and months. It will be only for television screens, which is where viewers do most of their Netflix viewing (70 per cent, the company said).

The implications for the industry could be significant. Over the past decade, nearly all media companies copied Netflix's TV home page when designing their own streaming services, with rows upon rows of titles.

Now the gap between Netflix and the traditional entertainment industry is so vast that HBO and Max executives say they would be happy to be considered as an "add-on" in households that already subscribe to Netflix. But at the same time, Netflix is locked in a battle for streaming TV time supremacy in the United States with YouTube. The Google-owned company has a fairly comfortable lead against Netflix, according to Nielsen, the research firm.

Company executives said they started dreaming up the new home page -- the internal nickname is Eclipse -- in late 2022.

Although Netflix's home page has been revised and updated several times over the past decade, executives said the company was beginning to hit a wall with the old design.

For starters, there was just the look itself, with seemingly endless rows of titles and tiles, one that Steve Johnson, Netflix's vice president of design, likened to a Blockbuster Video shelf. Eunice Kim, Netflix's chief product officer, said, "The way that the old home page is built, you kind of see box art, box art, box art, box art."

"It's kind of suboptimal, right?" she added.

Subscribers firing up their Netflix app, she said, have traditionally been divided into two branches: about half who know exactly what they want to watch versus another half who have sort of an idea, or no idea at all. Kim said, however, that the not-knowing-what-they-want group had increased in recent years.

"That just means our product needs to work even harder to kind of introduce these titles to folks for the first time," she said.

Enter Eclipse. Though the Netflix catalog remains as big as ever, the new home page will display fewer titles. When a subscriber hovers over a title, however, it will expand into a much bigger image on the screen. That image will be packed with information, including a brief description and badges that will say things like "highly rewatched," "spent 13 weeks in the Top 10" or "Oscar nominee."

After a couple of seconds, a preview video from the show or movie will then begin to play. (The company has found that people are more likely to watch a show or movie after seeing a clip.) The goal, Kim said, is "getting you to kind of slow down and notice a little bit more about the title versus scanning."

Eclipse will also begin to quickly offer subscribers recommendations based on their searches, "something we've been pursuing really for a couple of years now," Peters said.

If a subscriber is searching for family movies, for example, more and more real estate lower on the home screen will start to populate with family-friendly programming. On the old home page, it could take up to a day for the algorithm to catch up.

"In the same way that people might talk about a TikTok as being like, 'Oh, gosh, it really seems to understand me,' we want our members to be able to feel that way about our service, right -- like we get them," Kim said.

Executives believe Eclipse will also drive viewers more urgently to live events like an NFL game, or a big fight.

"You see the livestream, and it's not just a piece of artwork, but you see the animation, the motion, the energy of the fight going on, right when you turn on the TV," Kim said.

Competitors seem eager to change up their home pages, too. Disney's CEO, Bob Iger, expressed some frustration with his company's streaming home pages in an earnings call this year, saying they had "to be more dynamic" and lamenting that they were "fairly static in nature."

Peters said that, with time, he hopes subscribers start to notice just how much better the new Netflix is. And then, he imagined, when they click over to their streaming competitors from Netflix, "those other experiences feel relatively static, maybe they feel a little bit old at some point in time, and stuck in the mud," he said.

"You know," he continued, "I wouldn't be sad about that outcome."