Is the best user interface for a TV the one that’s been in place for the last 50 or so years? That’s what Kyle Vanhemert argued in a story published on Wired.com, which suggests that Netflix should adopt a couch potato-friendly leanback mode that just starts playing things, as opposed to forcing you to make a choice.
“Smart” TVs have failed because they’ve always assumed more is better. Instead of evolving the television experience, TV makers have simply added to it, heaping more streams, more services, and more content onto our sets without rethinking the interfaces for accessing them. The same problem plagues the services that power those smart TVs. Netflix offers thousands of options for what to watch, but instead of giving you a chance to skip through and sample them, it makes you evaluate each one, like a title on a video-store shelf.
