Netflix: viewing history and genre codes explained

Christine Persaud listed several Netflix features in an Engadget article, describing them as hidden options that many subscribers may not be aware of. The first concerns viewing history. On a web browser, users sign in to their account, select the down arrow beside the profile icon and choose Manage Profiles. From there they open their profile and scroll to Viewing Activity, which shows a list of everything watched along with the date. The list has no search function, so moving back through it means pressing Show More page after page. Alternatively, users can select Download All and review the entire history.

Persaud points to two practical uses for the history. The first is checking what children are watching on an account without restrictions. The second is the hide icon, which lets someone conceal episodes they watched alone of a series they share with a partner. Persaud notes that subscribers of many years can find it hard to remember every movie and TV episode they have viewed, which is where the history helps.

Netflix's standard categories do not cover very specific tastes. Numeric codes can be entered into the address instead: users open a browser and type netflix.com/browse/genre/ followed by the code. According to Persaud, the Netflix-Codes website provides a comprehensive list. Codes can have four, five, six or seven digits. Persaud gives the example of Christmas children and family films from the 1990s, with the code 1476024. The same page also allows titles to be bookmarked for later viewing.

Persaud tried some of the codes herself. With 8985, for martial arts films, she says it worked and instantly brought up titles including Kill Bill. With 7687, the film noir code, she could see that The Game, Zodiac and The Departed were available to stream. She specifies that she is based in Canada, so the titles she saw with those codes apply to her country.

The codes work by typing them manually into the browser address, so the method takes an extra step compared with ordinary navigation. The history, for its part, has no internal search and has to be scrolled page by page. The titles Persaud cites are the ones she sees from Canada, and the source does not state whether the same list applies elsewhere.