Netflix’s Shuffle Play feature, which the company tested last year, will have a widespread release in the first half of 2021. Variety reports that the company made the announcement as part of its latest financial results. In its testing phase, Shuffle Play worked by choosing content based on your watch history, helping you to avoid overloading the Netflix home screen full of content.
Netflix’s COO and chief product officer, Greg Peters, said the feature was designed so that users “let us know they want to skip browsing altogether, click a button and we’ll choose a title for them to play instantly” feature, Netflix experimented with including a “Shuffle Play” button on its profile selection screen and an “Play Something” option on its menu.
Here’s how it ended up looking:
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Julia Alexander / The Verge photo
The big question now is how Netflix will eventually call the resource. During his presentation of results, co-CEO Reed Hastings joked that they could call him “I’m feeling lucky” in honor of Google’s search feature that goes straight to the main search result. But Peters quickly gave up on that idea.
“We’re going to come up with something better than that, so wait for it. You’ll see when it comes out, ”said Peters.
Whatever his name, Shuffle Play will join another recent attempt by Netflix to make it easier to find content to watch. Last year, she added a “New and popular” guide to the service, which features a mix of new, popular and future content.