Non-Consensual Personalization
I feel like the implication is that people prevent you from customizing stuff for ego reasons, but isn't it a lot of code and testing to implement the personalization UI?<p>But thinking about it more, I suppose the answer is to let the users write their own clients.  Netflix should have a JSON API that's a list of all the programs, and each record should contain a link to video file.  They don't do that because of DRM and they specifically want to prevent you from writing a program that saves the downloaded bytes to disk.  So I guess there is no way to achieve their business goals (make sure you pay $20/month forever to watch stuff, and make sure the "rights holders" get to sell you the same thing multiple times) without doing more work, which they simply chose not to do because they don't have to.<p>Going one level deeper, I guess that video streaming is a weird market.  You could have the worst software and the best content and probably win.  So you can't compete with Netflix by making a video streaming service that has more UI features.  I guess what this means is that copyright is deterring innovation.  I think I've heard that one before.  Sigh!