Netflix’s new Shuffle Play feature aims to help end endless scrolling by choosing titles manually based on your viewing history.
Having been tested at the end of last year, Shuffle Play will soon be released globally. The streaming giant made the announcement as part of its latest financial results, which revealed it had surpassed 200 million subscribers worldwide.
Shuffle Play is not the only new feature that Netflix is working on. The video streaming service claims to have better sound quality on Android devices, thanks to support for the xHE-AAC audio codec.
This codec will “improve intelligibility in noisy environments,” says Netflix on its technology blog, which explains in meticulous detail how it aims to normalize the sound volume while maintaining the dynamic range for more comfortable listening.
In addition to improving clarity in noisy environments, the new codec will also allow audio to adapt to varying cellular connections, so you don’t suffer even if you have dubious mobile reception.
Netflix
Netflix introduced this adaptive bit rate methodology on the video side in 2019, so we’re happy that now it’s also on audio.
To take advantage of these enhanced audio features, you will need to watch Netflix on a device running Android 9 or later, versions of the operating system that have native support for the xHE-AAC codec.
The codec is also compatible with iOS 13 and later, as well as Amazon’s Fire OS 7 and later. Netflix says in its blog that it expects the lessons learned “to apply to other platforms that support the new codec”, so it expects these operating systems to acquire the same skills soon.
Netflix had an excellent year, adding more than 36 million customers globally in 2020. This brings its total number of subscribers to more than 203 million.
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