Netflix’s New Look Is a Glimpse at the Future of TV

Netflix just announced a whole new browsing experience for users who access the service on more than half the devices that run it, from game consoles to smart TVs. On the surface it just looks like a sleek new interface upgrade – better images, more integrated program information – but underneath there’s a hint of things to come: the idea that soon, viewers will look at the video-streaming service no differently than they do the guide channel piped in through their living room’s cable box.

“We wanted to think about ‘What is the future of television? Where is the future of television in an on-demand world?’” Chris Jaffe, Netflix’s vice president of product innovation, told WIRED while giving a demonstration of the new TV interface’s capabilities. “We also look at this as the first step of a lot of our television innovation to come.”

What Jaffe was demonstrating – a new “TV experience” that starts rolling out Wednesday to PlayStation 3 (and eventually PS4), Roku 3, Xbox 360, certain web-enabled smart TVs and Blu-ray players – is the result of a year and a half of development by Netflix. It’s the biggest change to the company’s TV experience to date and, although Jaffe doesn’t say it, offers a glimpse of what Netflix would look like if it were its own network. Earlier this year, chief content officer Ted Sarandos told GQ that the company’s goal is “to become HBO faster than HBO can become us.” Want to know what that might look like? See this latest update.

And it looks pretty slick. While idling on any particular movie or TV show, a series of three static images from the media cycle in the background. It also spits out information about what Emmys/Oscars/etc. a show or movie has won and, if the user has connected their Netflix account to Facebook, it will show which of their friends also are fans. ”Reed Hastings has watched House of Cards,” Jaffe joked, pointing out that the Netflix CEO’s icon popped up after he selected the program.

He better have. Because that show – as well as Orange and its run of Arrested Development and other original programs – demonstrate what Netflix will look like in the future. The streaming service had a lot of success with its original programming – it got 14 Primetime Emmy nominations this year – and it has more in the works, including a whole slate of superhero programs from Marvel Studios. It’s easy to see how those would integrate on the new platform, which looks a lot more like a choose your own adventure cable channel than ever before. (Note that Netflix even calls itself “the world’s leading internet TV network” in the promotional video below.)

Netflix currently has some 40 million users watching a billion hours of movies and TV shows per month and has surpassed HBO with its U.S. subscriber base. To the average boob-tube junkie, it’s as much a station option as anything else they consume. Now there’s talk that Netflix wants to be piped into televisions straight through cable set-top boxes. If its goal is to be HBO, it’s on its way.