The one thing that would sell my husband on Channels is user accounts like Netflix, Hulu, etc.
I’m setting this up for a 4 person household and one big library is cumbersome.
You could still record to the same folder but each account could have hooks to what that account recorded.
Thanks for the feedback!
Are you more concerned with organization or watch state (ie, one person watches a recording and it’s then set as watched)?
Both. There will be overlap between the users. Right now my default is to not automatically delete when watched so organization is the priority. It would be nice to have separate watch flags for each account. So if I watched a show but my son hasn’t it would show watched for me and unwatched for him. Can live without that but that would be the goal.
Just for full transparency, we’ve been pondering a good way to implement users for years. Even before we made Channels. We’ve been at this game a long time.
The issue is never “how to track watch state and library ownership by user”. That part is simple. The issue is “how do we make sure the right user has been picked”. It’s a UI nightmare.
Ask anyone with a house full of people with Netflix accounts. People just don’t care. They don’t exit a “user” and enter their own before watching. They just watch something. Because of this, we’ve never been convinced it’s something anyone would even respect even if the feature existed. Without a simple obvious way to switch users, all of the work is for nothing.
Beyond that, there’s also a ton of cases that “logging in” as a user doesn’t cover. What if 3 people in a household all watch at once? How you mark the episode as having been watched by all 3 people? There’s a ton of UI implementations that could handle this, but they’re all very very terrible and turn the experience in to an administrative nightmare.
All that being said, we totally understand the issues you’re communicating. And they’re always in the back of our head while we try to make Channels a better experience for EVERYONE in the home.
Yeah, about that separate “users” on Netflix… “Is that on your watch list or mine?” “Uh, mine, I think.” “Nope, must’ve been yours.” Or it’s on both. Or “It’s not on my watch list. I thought you put it on yours.”
We’ve actually considered dumping the individual users and merge everything back into one.
And that’s with only two people in the house.
Is my family weird? There’s four of us, the youngest being 10, but we all login to our own user profiles when we sit down and it doesn’t pop up since we all like keeping track of where we are in shows. There were some issues when my kids were younger, but they like keeping track of where they are in shows so they make sure they switch to their user.
I don’t see how that would be difficult if the watch status was tracked per user. Each instance of playing back the video is only tied to the user that’s playing it. Netflix does a great UI implementation… when you open the app it pops up and asks you what user you are. The only thing I would like to see from Netflix is the user icon in the corner or somewhere to show what user profile is currently being used.
My point about multiple people watching at once is, yeah, it only tracks watch state for the person that is “logged in”. So if User 1 goes back to check what episode is next, it’s correct. For user 2 and 3, it’s wrong, because while they did watch it, only User 1 had it marked as watched.
Scenarios like this make a developer throw papers in the air and just skip the feature, which is what we’ve done so far 
My family uses the Netflix and Hulu accounts. It really makes a difference. Whereas with Amazon Prime Video there really aren’t separate users. And it’s a mess.
Netflix works well for us. 3 of us were watching Bojack Horseman but were at different places in the series. Didn’t have to remember exactly which episode I wanted to watch next when starting a new session.
But most of the time we watch widely different shows and with Netflix it works well.
I don’t think there’s any way to fix multiple people watching the same episode together and only one profile getting the progress lol… but that’s what the ‘Mark as Watched’ button is for.
I’ve been in software development a good many years. Since before Microsoft DOS, in fact. (Yes, Virginia, once-upon-a-time there was no Microsoft Windows.) I’ve designed and written software both as a paid professional and as a hobbyist–on and for a wide variety of platforms and in everything from machine code to 4GL languages.
It has been my experience that attempting to satisfy every enhancement request under the sun results in a product that only people with advanced engineering degrees can use, and still you’ll get more requests for additional bells and whistles.
It is not my intention to discount the value of Tallmomof2’s request, but only to say that each and every request has to be weighed as to its complexity–both the complexity of engineering, which directly affects product stability, and end-user use complexity, which affects usability–against to the number of users requesting it. At the extremes: Few requests and high complexity: Probably not. Many requests and low complexity: Probably so.
I’ve a simple project you’ll find on Linux distros. I’ve received many, many requests over the years to add this or that or the other feature. I’ve rejected most of them, as per my evaluation criteria above. Even when somebody else did all the work and submitted a patch. The result is it’s stable and people use it. Somebody once forked the project and tried to add every bell and whistle under the sun. After much initial excitement it was gone, had disappeared, in less than a year. Nobody could use it.
Oft times simple is better, even if it doesn’t do everything you’d like it to do.
Don’t know if this is possible since I don’t do any type of coding, just an idea.
Could you go at the problem from another direction. Instead of Mark as Watched only listed once, could you set it up for an optional number of persons who want to watch it (say 4 in a household) and when all 4 Mark as Watched are checked off, then it is actually completed.
I’m on the same page as this. I’ll also say could you deliver a MVP and just see how it works. Have it in a beta and let people who are interested play around. I personally would love to have this feature as well. With fall tv coming back up I’ll have plenty of things to record and test this out.
Another thing to think of is you can’t please everyone. So with the MVP mindset you might be able to come up with something simple and functional. Keep in mind your customers are people who are setting up their own DVR. I would hope they could figure out how to use user profiles, if that’s a feature they want to enable on their DVR.
Just a couple of suggestions:
A. Make MVP optional (default off)
B. Prompt a Who’s watching? dialogue to pop up once when 1st show watched after opening app, don’t prompt again until next closed/opened but also manually selectable if needed to change within a session. This user selection would allow multiple users to be selected at once