Comment by nbevans 17 hours ago
I wanted to re-watch this on Netflix but it seems they removed it some time ago and have no plans to bring it back. It seems the interactivity features were obsoleted from their app platform as they were hard to support?
My kid loved that interactive Bear Grylls stuff, still talks about it sometimes (what his wrong choices were etc.) Sometimes I think they kill this stuff before it get mainstream. Also, some way to control via the TV, or Chromecast may have made this more popular.
I remember Bear Grills "You vs. Wild" as one of the most well-known interactive shows. It's strange it's never mentioned in articles about interactive Netflix features.
I see.
But surely Netflix could have setup 1 to 3 of the "best" variants of the Bandersnatch and let people watch those? Even a "directors cut" based on how the director chose the path, would suffice.
The content is entirely gone right now. Which is pretty tragic as it was excellent.
> The content is entirely gone right now.
It's officially gone, but you can acquire the raw video through other means and plug it into this open source reimplementation of the frontend: https://mehotkhan.github.io/BandersnatchInteractive/
This is really exciting, but I'm having an immense amount of trouble finding the single 1080p-quality release that is listed as known to work.
Edit: For that matter, I actually can't seem to find the 720p releases either.
That was a standalone piece though, rather than some sort of trend. The choose-your-own nature of it was integral to the story and referential to the contemporary books which were CYO.
Your theory fits fine with “We’re not going to make a series like this or turn it into a genre”, but not so well with “we already made this thing and it was really popular, but we’ve decided to take it off the platform”
Netflix did try to turn it into a genre, they made a few dozen CYOA specials before giving up.
https://www.polygon.com/22286070/netflix-interactive-shows-m...
It makes no sense to me at all. If they don't want to support interactivity features in their overall Netflix.com front-end, they should release a separate app.
They're still trying to get into video games—they just bought the rights to FIFA, for goodness sakes—so they should make use of their ready-made content.
There is no way the actual code for selecting choices is particularly complicated. Maybe as part of a larger codebase it could become tech debt, but on its own?
A separate app would be a lot more work. Not only do you need to publish separate apps on all of the platforms you still need to maintain that separate app (even if it's 100% locked to bug and security patching).
If I were to guess, it had less to do with being "too difficult" and more to do with "not being worth it". I.e. they have the numbers for how many people were watching the limited interactive content from years ago, they know whether they plan on having more interactive video content, and they know how much it is to maintain across different apps (and likely don't want to fragment their service availability to support something they identify as a declining niche). Just because they may be getting into games does not mean it makes sense to have support for other interactive stuff people hardly ever watch.
They tried something different, it didn't work out to be popular enough to bother with for the rest of time, and they moved on.
> If I were to guess, it had less to do with being "too difficult" and more to do with "not being worth it"
That's what I mean, too difficult for the expected return.
> A separate app would be a lot more work. Not only do you need to publish separate apps on all of the platforms you still need to maintain that separate app
We're talking about, what, Android and iOS? Those are the only platforms where Netflix has been publishing games AFAIK. I'm not suggesting they maintain it on every platform with a Netflix app!
I just don't believe it would be much work. If it's an app, it doesn't even have to handle streaming, it can just play the local video file. Heck, we have a fan-made codebase we can use as a reference:
https://github.com/joric/bandersnatch/blob/master/bandersnat...
<500 lines of code, plus two json files which are admittedly much longer but look auto-generated. I assume they came from Netflix, which means they exist already.
Even acknowledging that an official version might necessitate more than this, it just shouldn't be a big lift, even relative to a very small number of users. If it is a big lift, then something else is very wrong inside Netflix.
Netflix must have spent millions of dollars producing Bandersnatch. It was critically acclaimed. I can understand not making more—but not doing a modicum of work to keep it in their catalog?
Probably couldn't find anyone willing to put their job on the line to maintain it. Netflix culture is big on chasing "impact" and other subjective metrics. Putting your hand up to maintain legacy only used by a small group of users is a good way to get yourself absolutely slaughtered even if the thing was liked. IIRC they had a sports quote which summarizes this better.
> as they were hard to support?
X to doubt. The tech worked fine. The real issue is that nobody wants choose-your-own-adventure TV, which has been proven again and again.