Netflix Has Added a Shuffle Button for You and All Your Indecisive Mates

The lucky dip of movies.

If you’ve ever been stuck for hours scrolling through Netflix struggling to pick a movie or TV show, you’ll wanna stick around for this one.

In an excellent turn of events, Netflix has gone ahead and solved one of the most first world problems of all time by giving indecisive watchers a shuffle button.

The new ‘Play Something’ button was added to the streaming service last week and is now available to all Aussies with a paid subscription.

Ah, gone are the screaming matches with siblings and friends about what to watch.

The button has been added across the entire service’s UI and will automatically suggest new shows and movies that you’ve never seen before.

If you’ve missed it so far and want to give it a go, you might have to search a little bit to find it. So far, the button can be found in three places: underneath your profile logo when you log in, in the tenth row of the homepage, and on the left-side navigation bar.

“It’s really working for us where our members can basically indicate to us that they just want to skip browsing entirely, click one button and we’ll pick a title for them just to instantly play,” Netflix COO and Chief Product Officer Greg Peters said in the company's Q4 investor interview.

Gotta love how lazy the human race is if we’re getting streaming services to make decisions for us.

Netflix now having a ‘play something’ feature is really helpful for my indecisiveness 🤣

— Charly✨🪐 (@StNPaedsCharly) April 30, 2021

While it is technically a ‘shuffle button’, Netflix is stressing that it isn’t just going to spit out a bunch of random titles that you might not like.

Instead, it’s going to use what the service already knows about you, what you’ve already watched, and things you might have enjoyed to give you a curated experience. 

It may also pick titles from your watchlist, so if you have some films in mind but haven’t gotten round to watching them, add them to your list ASAP.

Before the feature actually made it to the platform, Netflix had been testing it for months and was tossing up other names like ‘Shuffle Play'.

Netflix also said that the new feature would be fully accessible to anyone with a disability.

“For members that use screen-readers, Play Something fully supports Text-to-Speech (TTS). To discover your next favorite film or show with Play Something using TTS, visit our Accessibility help center for more information on how to enable this feature through your TV device settings,” the company said in a statement.

So, if you’ve got nothing else to do tonight, here’s your excuse to binge… something new.

Header Image: Netflix