Netflix is fantastic at enabling you to binge on new content whenever your heart desires. The problem is that we often get addicted to binge sessions end up going well into the night on a viewing rampage, which doesn’t leave you in the best of shape for your next working day. If you were able to stay up all night and ended up falling asleep only to wake up in the final moments of that episodic cliffhanger, you’d feel utterly cheated out of the experience.
Or wonder why your phone is dead in the morning.
Netflix knows how people lack the discipline to commit to watching just one last episode in bed, and is launching a new trial on Android devices which will allow subscribers to set a timer for their viewing period. The new feature will allow people to choose between different timer settings: 15 minutes, 30 minutes, 45 minutes, or at the end of whatever movie/episode people are watching, bringing the session to an end once this has been reached, rather than just rolling over to the next episode.
Not all Android subscribers will have this feature, but the company is planning to slowly ramp up to all users if no issues are revealed, eventually including the feature in all other versions of its app. To use it, all you need to do is following these directions:
- Choose and play your favourite TV show or movie on your mobile device.
- In the upper right corner, subscribers will see a clock icon that is labelled Timer.
- Tap on Timer.
- Select 15, 30, 45 minutes, or “Finish Show.”
This is a useful feature and one that makes a lot of sense. This could also be something that would make it useful for parents to control the viewing habits of their kids and ensure they are only watching a show for the next few minutes, although oddly enough won’t be available on kids’ profiles for now. Perhaps Netflix will allow parents to control kids viewing times in future updates.
If you’re someone who lacks the self-control to stop watching when you have another appointment or need to get some sleep, maybe this new feature will be the silent guardian that you need.
Last Updated: February 2, 2021
MaSeKind
February 2, 2021 at 04:36
Hopefully someone makes a list of people who needs this feature so we know whose to blame when the machines take over. What are they going to add next? Telling people when to go to the bathroom or when to eat?
Makes sense for limiting children maybe. But they shouldn’t be sitting on their phones watching Netflix the whole time in anyway.
It’s very fascinating how the internet is simultaneously making people smarter by giving them access to humanities combined knowledge, and on the other hand making people so dumb and lazy they need to be told when they’ve watched too much Netflix