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What Netflix’s newly-revamped TV UI tells us about the company’s ambitions

This week, Netflix unveiled the biggest overhaul of its TV UI in over a decade. The new interface is, in a nutshell, less cluttered, and more responsive to a viewer’s needs. But for Netflix, the redesign also is an acknowledgement that the world of streaming, and the company’s role in it, has changed.

Netflix is no longer the scrappy underdog, reinventing TV while the rest of the industry is trying to play catch-up. The company has become a global powerhouse with over 300 million subscribers. It’s increasingly not just competing with cable, but also streamers like Disney+ and Max, as well as everything else that keeps us glued to our screens: TikTok, YouTube, Fortnite, you name it.

The streamer has responded to that by venturing into games and live programming, and tried to cram all of those new things into its existing UI. That hasn’t been the best approach, as Netflix Chief Product Officer Eunice Kim acknowledged during a press call this week. “We're entertaining our members in even more ways, which means the TV experience needs to evolve,” Kim said.

Kim and Netflix CTO Elizabeth Stone used that call to highlight a number of new features incorporated into the revamped UI. They also stressed that this was just the beginning. “Our current TV experience was built for streaming shows and movies,” Kim said. “This one is designed to give us a more flexible canvas now and in the future.”

With that in mind, I decide to take a closer look at what the new UI tells us about Netflix's plans for its future:

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