Our long national nightmare of autoplaying Netflix previews has finally come to an end.
The streaming service on Thursday announced it's rolling out a long-awaited feature: the ability to turn off previews that automatically play while users are browsing the service. This has been a common complaint about Netflix's user experience for quite some time, as subscribers found themselves darting around the Netflix app as not to settle on a movie or TV show for too long and spark a trailer. Search the phrase "Netflix" and "autoplay" any given day on Twitter, and you'd find no shortage of grievances.
In fact, that may be what Netflix did on Thursday, responding to a tweet begging for a way to turn these off by announcing that one now exists, although Netflix made the bold claim that "some people" actually like the autoplay previews. For that reason, they're not turning autoplay previews off entirely, but just allowing users to opt-out by going to "manage profiles," clicking your profile, and unchecking "autoplay previews while browsing on all devices." While you're at, you can also opt out of having the next episode in a series play automatically.
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Immediately, a sigh of relief swept through Twitter and indeed the nation, as if a weight had been collectively lifted off all 167 million Netflix subscribers' shoulders. "I just fixed my settings and loaded the Netflix homepage and heard.....silence," Insider's Kim Renfro tweeted. "It was overwhelmingly beautiful. Pure bliss. Like I had ascended to a new plane of existence."
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