Join the Netflix Preview Club if you’re interested in watching movies and TV series before they’re released to the general public in exchange for providing comments and reviews.

The club is letting in more people. Currently, there are around 2,000 recruits, but that number is expected to increase into the tens of thousands by the beginning of 2023.

According to the WSJ, “Netflix is working to ensure that every dollar spent on content yields the highest level of member attention and engagement across its 223 million-strong subscriber base globally,” as streamers more heavily scrutinise content spending and focus more on profitability.

More comedy is required

Variety first reported on the Netflix Preview Club, a similar programme to those offered by Amazon Prime Video and Hulu. Although it’s not unprecedented, Netflix appears eager to increase its own system for obtaining early feedback on films and TV shows.

According to reports, the upcoming 2021 Netflix film Don’t Look Up will have more comedic moments as a result of viewer input. Record amounts of time were spent watching it each week on the streaming site, and it also received four Oscar nominations.

It’s unclear how members of the Netflix Preview Club are selected, but if you want to join, you should keep an eye on your inbox. A representative sample of Netflix’s subscriber base is probably important to the company.

Helpful comments

While test screenings are frequent in the entertainment business, it’s intriguing to get an insight into how early evaluations and comments function at Netflix. The Wall Street Journal reports that Netflix staff members also participate in pre-release content evaluation.

A platform like Netflix has the luxury of a vast quantity of user data: what people are viewing, how quickly they’re watching it, what they want to watch next, and even at what point in films or series they give up and leave watching something.

All of that is useful input for making sure an effort succeeds when others fail. A recent paper claims that authors “are often permitted to determine which revisions to make,” suggesting that they are not required to make any changes.

How much is changed also relies on the amount of extra material the production teams have available to work with; reshoots are time-consuming and expensive, so it’s unlikely that anything will be redone unless it receives overwhelmingly bad feedback.