Ever have the hankering to watch an old Clint Eastwood western? Or maybe you really want to see Liam Neeson hunt down and kill kidnappers, or maybe wolves?* Maybe you’re just aching to watch Woody Allen stammer and say Woody Allen things in that Woody Allen way?
Well now, if you have Netflix and an Xbox 360, you can. Or at least, you can find those movies more quickly thanks to a new feature called People Search, announced today on the Netflix blog.** That means that, in addition to movie and TV shows that appear in search, users can also search for their favorite movie actors.
The search interface now shows actor names alongside other content titles, so that you can browse them as well. Once you’ve chosen an actor, Netflix will display all the available streaming content that he or she has appeared in. The feature is already available on the web and on the PlayStation 3 interface — and Netflix is likely to slowly roll it out on other devices as well.
Which is awesome, but it all points to how incredibly frustratingly fragmented this whole industry is, that some dude with an Xbox 360 can just hunt down Nick Cage movies***, but here I am on my Roku trying to make sense of this guide and unable to ever find anything good that I want to watch. Please, Netflix, fix this for all the rest of us as well. I beg of you.
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* I don’t actually know that this movie is about killing wolves. I’ve never seen it. I just assume so, due to the cover art and Liam Neeson’s penchant for killing things.
** If this is a feature that’s been available for weeks in A/B tests and they’re just announcing now, as Netflix is wont to do, I apologize, dear reader. Sadly, I am without an Xbox 360, and I generally don’t have the time to breathlessly keep up on all the minor feature releases like this as they’re quietly introduced. I’m sure you’ll let me know how lame I am in the comments, though, so thanks for that.
*** Because really, who does that? Who searches for Nick Cage?