What Features Should My Entertainment App Have to Compete With Netflix?

Netflix has more than 312 million subscribers worldwide, according to AlphaSense, 2025. That figure does two things to a product team. It fixes everyone's idea of which streaming app features are normal, and it quietly turns "match Netflix" into the plan.

We've worked on products in travel, residential, sport, wellness and music, and the same thing happens in all of them. A team writes down what the market leader does, builds a smaller version of it, and launches something that works fine and means nothing to anyone.

A feature list can be copied in a quarter. The reason someone opens your app can't be.

So this article isn't a shopping list. It's a way of deciding which entertainment app features deserve your budget, which ones you can do badly without anyone minding, and which ones you should leave out entirely so the rest can be good.

We'll cover the basics you can't skip, why parity loses, how to choose what works offline, how to handle discovery when you have no data about a new user, the social layer the big platforms have never really built, and what it costs to run any of it.

The Table Stakes: Streaming App Features You Cannot Skip

There's a small set of things people expect without ever thinking about them. They don't notice these working. They notice them failing, and then they leave.

Streaming app features people notice when broken

• Playback that starts in a second or two, every time
• Resume where you left off, across phone, tablet and TV
• Subtitles, captions and audio description that are easy to turn on
• Search that forgives spelling and finds people as well as titles
• Profiles, so a household isn't one blurred taste
• Casting or a proper TV app, because sofa viewing is the point

None of these win you a subscriber. All of them lose you one. A person who taps play on a Friday night and gets a spinner has learned something about your product that no amount of clever design undoes later.

The honest way to treat this list is as the price of entry rather than the plan. Budget for it first, build it properly, and test it on the cheap Android phone and the five-year-old TV stick that your audience actually owns. Then spend whatever's left on the thing that makes you worth choosing.

Why Feature Parity With Netflix Does Not Win Users

There's a lot of research showing that feature parity on its own doesn't carry a product. Having the same features, or better ones, doesn't move anyone. What moves them is whether you understand how they're feeling, what they're actually trying to do, and the situation they're in while they do it. A feature that works beautifully in one context dies in another.

Viewers can't even keep the big platforms straight. Hub Entertainment Research, 2026 found that fewer than half of viewers correctly identify which service carries signature shows like Landman, The Pitt or High Potential. If people can't place a flagship series, they're certainly not comparing your download manager with anyone else's.

A client came to us with an app for a block of expensive apartments. The brief was a building directory with a maintenance logger attached, which is a reasonable feature list and a dull product. Our focus groups kept surfacing something else, which was how isolated people felt in a building full of neighbours they'd never met.

So we put a social feed at the heart of it. Residents posted, asked neighbours for help, and followed the concierge team and local charities. The building management features stayed, sitting underneath as a second layer. It stopped being a directory and started being a small social network, and that came from the psychology, not from a competitor audit.

Doing Fewer Things Brilliantly: The 88% Problem

We work from a blunt assumption. A person who has a bad experience in your app doesn't come back, and they don't tell you why. That assumption changes how you spend, because every extra feature is another surface that can be slow, broken or confusing on launch night.

It also wastes money. Futuristic Bug reports that close to 60% of app features are rarely or never used, which means a big share of most roadmaps is paid for twice, once to build and again to maintain.

Every feature you ship is another thing that can break, and breakage is what people remember.

We saw this directly on an auction game. Engagement was sliding and the client's instinct was to keep adding new features to pull people back in. We watched the rate keep dropping while the feature list grew.

What we did instead was go back to the core journey, the plain business of someone arriving and playing the game, and fix that rather than the ancillary features sitting around it. When the middle of a product has gone soft, bolting things onto the edges makes it worse, because it spreads a thin team across more ground.

Fewer things, done properly, with budget left over to execute them well. That's the trade.

Offline Viewing, Downloads and Choosing What Actually Needs Them

Downloads are the feature everyone assumes they need and few teams cost properly. Storage rules, licence windows, expiry, partial downloads, resume after a dropped connection, and what happens when someone deletes the app. It's a product inside a product.

On a travel app we worked on, we started by finding the highest-stress moments in the journey, things like check-in, pulling up a booking reference and retrieving a ticket, and made those work without a signal. Adding a technical failure to a moment that's already stressful does real damage. Then we ran a dependency test over everything else. Does this need a server round trip, or can it live on cached data, and how often does that data change?

The same sorting works for video. Passive consumption should be offline-first. Anything transactional either fails gracefully with a plain message or queues for later.

Before you build downloads, ask where your audience watches. A commuter product needs them on day one. A living-room product may never need them at all, and the money is better spent on playback quality.

Discovery, Recommendations and the Cold Start Problem

On day one you know nothing about a new user and your recommendation engine has nothing to chew on. Most products paper over this with a grid of popular titles, which tells the person they've arrived somewhere generic.

We worked on a genetics wellness app that had drifted into being a set of results screens, accurate and cold. Retention didn't improve through new features or a visual redesign. It improved when we brought the narrative and the storytelling back, and gave people a real sense of identity inside the product, so it felt like it was speaking to them rather than reporting at them.

Video discovery has the same problem in a different coat. A row labelled "Because you watched" is a data output. A row that says something human about who you are, and why this particular thing is here tonight, is a story. The second one gets watched.

For the cold start itself, ask for less and infer more. Two or three taste questions wrapped inside something enjoyable will carry you further than a twenty-item grid of genres. After that, the signals arrive fast, and they're richer than anything someone will type for you.

Time of day, device, session length and how quickly someone bails out of a trailer all say something. Use them before you ask.

Personalisation a Giant Cannot Afford: Adapting to Mood and Moment

A platform serving hundreds of millions of people has to build for the average. You don't. That's the real gap, and it's the one place where a smaller product can be better rather than cheaper.

On the travel app, we adapted the experience to emotional state. Where we read someone as anxious, dwelling on screens and moving slowly, we limited what they could see of the rewards and badges and showed only the next thing within reach, maybe one or two beyond it. For people breezing through, we opened that window right up so they could see everything available and track what they'd earned against what was still out there.

Translate that to viewing. Someone opening three titles, reading three synopses and backing out of all of them is in a different state from someone who opens and plays in nine seconds. The first person needs fewer options and a stronger steer. The second needs you to get out of the way.

Any reward layer you add has to feel like it was built for that person. Use what onboarding told you, plus what their behaviour implies about the kind of viewer they are and the mood they're likely in. A generic badge system reads as impersonal straight away, and people disengage from it quickly.

Onboarding That Knows When, Not Just Who

Most onboarding asks for things. Data, permissions, a card, an account, all before the person has seen anything worth having. Our preference is narrative onboarding, where you show the value and the story first and ask afterwards.

One pet peeve above all others is the notifications prompt that fires the second an app opens, before the user has seen a single thing about what's on offer.

Asking for push permission before you've shown anything is asking for trust you haven't earned yet.

There's a cost to every extra step too. UXCam reports that each additional onboarding step can raise churn by around 20%, which makes a ten-screen setup an expensive way to learn someone's favourite genre.

On the concierge app, we tuned onboarding to time as well as to person. If someone signed up midweek after arriving on site, we held back the suggestion to explore the local area until the weekend, when they had time for it. We waited a couple of days after move-in before showing where the recycling was, on the reasonable assumption they'd be surrounded by boxes by then. If a household had children, the kid-friendly features came forward.

Same features. Different order, different week, and a product that feels like it's paying attention.

Designing the Social Layer Netflix Has Never Built

Watching is already social. People text about shows, argue about endings, and nag each other to catch up. The big platforms have left nearly all of that outside the app, which leaves room for a smaller product to build it in deliberately.

We worked on a football app built around removing hate from social media. It replaced likes and dislikes with a favourites mechanic, so there was no way to publicly dislike anything, and comment functionality was deliberately limited. The hard part was keeping it feeling like a community rather than a passive content feed, while taking out the public score that drives approval-seeking and pile-ons.

That trade-off applies directly to entertainment. A public rating on an episode invites a pile-on. A shared watchlist between two people, a nudge when a friend finishes something, a private group that follows a series together, all of these create the feeling of company without the scoreboard.

Before you add a counter to anything, ask what someone does when the number is low. If the answer is "feels judged" or "deletes the post", the counter is costing you more than it earns.

Co-viewing and synced playback get talked about far more than they get used. Shared lists and quiet signals of what people you know are watching do more work for less engineering.

Engagement Without the Dark Patterns: Learning From 'Are You Still Watching?'

Netflix does one thing here really well. If you're just constantly watching, it stops and asks whether you're still there. That's a natural break where you can say, actually, I'm going to stop, and it hands the decision back to you without taking the feature away.

It's worth looking at that pattern as a design model rather than a technicality. Infinite scroll on social platforms could carry the same idea, a periodic pause or a line about how long you've been in there, slowing things just enough for someone to choose to leave.

Most social products are tuned for the moment of engagement rather than the relationship over time, which is a way of extracting attention instead of building trust. The numbers look good for a while. The product gets quietly resented.

For an entertainment app, trust is the thing that survives a weak month of content. A viewer who feels respected forgives a thin release schedule. A viewer who feels farmed cancels the first time the card gets declined.

Give people a visible way to stop. An end-of-episode pause, a session summary, or a simple "that's your three for tonight" costs you minutes today and keeps the subscription alive next month.

Content Rights, Catalogue Gaps and Smarter Third-Party Integrations

Content is where the money goes and where the gaps show. Netflix is unusual in that streaming accounts for 100% of its revenue, so the catalogue has to carry everything. A smaller product can borrow instead of buying, and the choice of partner shapes the whole experience.

We did proof-of-concept work for a company building an app where people shared memories with audio attached. The obvious route was Spotify. The problem was that Spotify had no robust API for short clips, and people needed a Spotify account to use any of it, which ate away at the experience for everyone who didn't have one.

So we switched to Deezer. The API was robust, it supported clips, and it didn't require users to be logged in. People could search a catalogue larger than Spotify's and attach a clip without leaving the app. When someone wanted to hear a full track, there was an upsell to a Deezer subscription, which opened up affiliate referral revenue as a second income stream alongside the product.

Pick integration partners on the experience they allow, then on the business model they open up. The biggest name in a category is often the worst technical partner, because it has no reason to make life easy for you.

Monetisation Models Beyond the Monthly Subscription

A monthly subscription asks for a decision every month, and people are already paying for several. US consumers subscribe to an average of 3.92 video streaming services, which is roughly the point at which someone opens their bank app and starts cancelling things.

Being the fifth subscription is a hard job. Being something else is often easier.

Every monthly subscription is a recurring decision to keep you, and most people are already looking for one to cut.

Worth weighing properly before you build the billing. An ad-supported tier brings volume and a very different design problem, since ad breaks have to be designed rather than inserted. Rentals and pay-per-view suit a catalogue with a few titles people actively want. Annual plans trade price for commitment and smooth out your cash. Bundles with a brand your audience already pays for put you inside someone else's billing relationship.

Then there's referral revenue, which the Deezer work showed us can sit alongside the main model without annoying anyone. A person who wants the full track, the match pass, the book, or the ticket is already in a buying mood, and sending them somewhere useful earns money while improving the moment.

Pick the model before you design the product, because it changes the whole shape of the home screen.

Performance, Devices and the Infrastructure Bill Nobody Budgets For

Video is expensive in ways that catch founders out after launch. Encoding every title into multiple renditions, storing all of them, paying for bandwidth each time someone watches, licensing DRM for protected content, and running the analytics that tell you whether playback is actually working.

The device problem is bigger than the phone. A living-room product means separate builds and separate certification for tvOS, Android TV, Fire TV, Roku and the Samsung and LG TV platforms, each with its own remote control behaviour and its own set of old models still in use. That's not one app with a wide layout. It's a family of apps, each needing testing and each needing updating when a platform changes.

Budgets written before anyone has priced this tend to assume a fraction of what the year really costs. The running bill grows as viewing grows, which is the opposite of how most product finance models behave.

Price twelve months of bandwidth and device QA at your target audience size before you sign off a feature list. If the numbers hurt, cut features now rather than cutting quality later.

Start on fewer platforms, measure where people actually watch, and expand into demand rather than ahead of it.

How to Prioritise Your Feature Roadmap Before You Build

Prioritisation gets easier once you stop comparing yourself to a competitor and start describing the person you're for. The concierge app only found its shape because the focus groups ran before the build, not after.

Here's the order we work in.

1. Write one sentence naming who this is for and what it does for them on a normal Tuesday night.
2. Find the three moments in that evening with the most emotion in them, good or bad.
3. Rank every proposed feature by how directly it serves those three moments.
4. Cut anything you can't execute to a high standard with the team and budget you really have.
5. Test the top of the list with real people before writing production code.
6. Re-run the whole thing once live behaviour disagrees with you, which it will.

The step people skip is the fourth one. It feels like giving up ground to a competitor, when it's just refusing to ship a weak version of something.

Half-built downloads, a recommendation engine with nothing to recommend, a social feed with no one in it. Each of those does more harm than leaving the feature out, because an empty room tells the visitor the party's over.

Conclusion

Nobody is going to beat Netflix on catalogue size, and nobody needs to. The products that find an audience do so because they understand a specific group of people, their mood, their week, their living room, better than a global platform can afford to.

So get the basics right and don't be proud about it. Fast playback, resume across devices, proper subtitles, honest offline behaviour. Then put the rest of the money into the one or two things that are yours, the way we put a social feed at the heart of a building app, took public dislikes out of a football community, and brought the storytelling back to a wellness product that had turned into a results screen.

The deciding question for any feature on your list is simple. Does it serve a moment that matters to your viewer, and can you build it well enough that nobody notices it working? If the answer to either half is no, leave it out and spend the money on something that earns its place.

If you're sizing up a roadmap and want a second opinion on what to build and what to drop, let's talk about your entertainment app.

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