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You’ve just watched the last episode of your favorite TV show, and now you’re left with a very important question to answer: what should I watch next? In this article, we introduce top 7 ways how to discover new movies and TV shows on Netflix to help you find an answer to that question.
1 Netflix Recommendations
The vast majority of content people watch on Netflix is discovered through the platform’s built-in recommendation system. Netflix collects heaps of information about its users’ behavior and preferences and combines it with tags and other metadata gathered from dozens of in-house and freelance staff, feeding everything into complex machine learning algorithms whose purpose is to figure out what users might like to watch next.
“We take all of these tags and the user behavior data, and then we use very sophisticated machine learning algorithms that figure out what’s most important—what should we weigh,” explained Todd Yellin, Netflix’s vice president of product innovation.
Some examples of where Netflix displays recommendations include the following rows:
- Trending Now
- Recently Added
- Exciting TV Shows
- Comedies
- Top Picks for You
- Because You Watched
Although the Netflix recommendation system is getting better every year, it’s still not perfect—especially when you confuse it. For example, if your roommate decides to binge on a few TV shows on your Netflix user account, you can be sure that the recommendations you’ll receive after will be heavily influenced by your roommate’s questionable taste.
2 Netflix Search
Netflix makes it possible to search for new movies and TV shows in a variety of ways. You can search by TV show or movie titles, actors and actresses, directors, genre, video quality, and language.
Best of all, you can search Netflix’s massive library of content on any PC or Mac:
- Open your favorite web browser and visit the following address: https://www.netflix.com/
- Sign in to your Netflix user account.
- Click the magnifier icon located in the top-right corner.
- Enter your search.
- Browse the matching search results.
Unlike Netflix’s recommendation system, the platform’s search engine leaves a lot to be desired. Users often complain that they feel like they’re stuck with the same hundred or so titles being repeated ad nauseum with no obvious way how to find the content they’re actually looking for. Some Netflix users have even decided to take everything into their own hands and solve the problem by creating third-party search engines for Netflix, such as the three described below.
3 Flixable
Created by Reddit user CrazedEli, aka Ville Salminen, Flixable is a third-party Netflix search engine that was inspired by the frustration expressed by many Netflix users on Reddit. “With Flixable, I had one aim: to build a site that would make it easier for Netflix subscribers to choose what to watch on a movie night,” said Salminen.
Let’s say you want to find a well-rated horror movie. You can apply the corresponding genre filter, limit the results to movies that are rated 8 or higher, choose your preferred audio language, and sort the remaining results by Netflix rating. If you’re looking only for classic horror movies, you can even limit the search results to movies that were released before 1970, or whichever year you prefer.
Flixable also displays trending movies and TV shows, titles that are leaving Netflix in the near future, and it conveniently lists all Netflix originals, including their rating. Flixable is completely free, and it has been translated into several major languages.
4 JustWatch
JustWatch is more than a Netflix search engine. This website and mobile app allows you to search several dozen online streaming services at once, with search filters to narrow down the search results to a manageable number.
JustWatch is available for Android and iOS, so you can comfortably use it while chilling on your couch in front of the TV. Both the online and the mobile versions of JustWatch allow you to select your favorite providers amongst 37 available and filter different attributes like movie genre or release year. Because JustWatch has over 60,000 movies and TV shows in its database, it’s unlikely that you’ll ever struggle to find something interesting to watch.
5 FlixList
The last third-party Netflix search engine we want to recommend is FlixList. Much like Flixable and JustWatch, FlixList helps you find the most interesting movies and TV shows from Netflix’s large library of content. In addition to search filters, FlixList has lists of IMDb top 250 and Rotten Tomatoes top 100 movies that are also available on Netflix.
6 r/bestofnetflix
This subreddit is the place to be for user-created Netflix recommendations. It currently has nearly 100,000 subscribers, who add at least one new recommendation every day. When you sort the subreddit by upvotes, it becomes very easy to discover Netflix’s hidden gems that might otherwise go totally unnoticed by you.
For Netflix originals and general discussion about the platform, we recommend r/netflix. Despite what its name might suggest, r/netflix is not affiliated with Netflix, and the moderators of the subreddit are not Netflix employees. At the moment, r/netflix has nearly 300,000 subscribers, and it’s growing just as fast as Netflix.
7 Netflix’s Social Media Accounts
Just like most companies these days, Netflix has an active social media presence. You can follow Netflix on Facebook, Twitter, and even Instagram. Facebook is an especially good way how to find out about upcoming Netflix Originals and other major releases.
Conclusion
With more than 130 million subscribers worldwide, Netflix is now the world’s leading internet entertainment service and one of the hottest companies in Silicon Valley. Netflix has a sophisticated recommendation system that helps users discover new movies and TV shows on the platform, but there are also other ways how to find interesting new content on Netflix.
In this article, we’ve introduced top 7 ways how to discover new content on Netflix, so you should have no problem finding something fresh to binge on after work.
