It’s been only a day or two when Netflix Internet TV services were launched in more than 130 new countries, the secrets about the services have started popping up. Of course this may not be new for users in the regions where Netflix was already present for years, this may be of interest to the ones who are using the service very first time.
If you aren’t familiar with Netflix, the service asks the users to select a set of shows on startup as their preferences and then on the basis of that selection, the service provides them with an array of shows in genres related to the users’ selection. However, there is a lot more behind what you see on your screen.
In fact, when the service provides you the option to select a few, it provides only from the content available to your location. No wonder the service is now available over 190 countries covering almost every corner of the world, the content of the service widely varies from one corner to another. For example, the popular US TV series Friends is not available in the UK. The utility software like VPN comes there to bypass territorial restrictions on the Netflix content.
While the Netflix is also working to deliver same content all around the world which will indeed remove the option of VPN for users. But the service itself revolves around the specific choice of the user as told above. The user actually requires to search a specific term for a program title or at most the user only would be able to browse a limited set of content which the service thinks is best match to his/her initial selection of genres.
Independent UK has pointed that there are websites informing about the genre codes (more specifically the links) which are not usually accessible when browsing the Netflix portal normally. These are more like the links or identities of the content you probably won’t see while browsing through the content on Netflix as the content provided to you is based on your preferences.
An example category is “Visually-striking movies for ages 5 to 7” which may not be present in your menu but the link to this section is http://www.netflix.com/browse/genre/2851. That ID at the end is being called as a secret code here only because it may not be visible in your menu if it doesn’t come under your selected preferences. You can swap or change that ID to anything to see if you can access anything beyond your genre list. Of course these numbers are not sequential and you would be out of luck with most of the numbers you use.
More specific links are provided by various websites. You can checkout at Ogres Crypt for a list of films by genre and sub-genre, another one here. A comprehensive list of codes is available in this Google spreadsheet. Another website is providing a list of IDs which you can use in the link as suggested. Or simply try searching Google for the “Netflix Genre Codes”.
The thing to note is that you play with the links which is only possible in a browser on your computer. You can not go with them in an app in your smartphone or on your smart TV.
