Stop the Endless Video Streaming and Loud Previews
Netflix is designed to keep you watching for as long as possible. One of the primary ways the platform achieves this is through its aggressive autoplay features. The moment you highlight a movie on the home screen, a loud trailer begins playing automatically. Worse, when you finish watching an episode of a television series, the next episode starts counting down immediately, often skipping the end credits and pulling you into the next hour of content before you can find your remote.
While some viewers enjoy this seamless transition, others find the loud, sudden previews incredibly disruptive when they are simply trying to browse for something to watch. Furthermore, the automatic “next episode” feature can completely ruin your sleep schedule if you lack the discipline to manually turn the television off.
Fortunately, Netflix allows you to disable both of these autoplay features. However, you cannot do this from your television or smartphone app; you must log into the Netflix website using a web browser to change these specific profile settings.
How to Disable Autoplay Previews and Next Episodes
These settings are tied to your specific user profile. This means if you turn autoplay off on your profile, it will not affect your partner or your children’s profiles on the same account.
- Open a web browser on your computer, tablet, or smartphone and navigate to Netflix.com.
- Log in using your account email address and password.
- If you are prompted to select “Who’s watching?”, click on your specific profile.
- Look at the top right corner of the screen. Hover your mouse over your Profile picture (or tap the menu icon if you are on a mobile browser).
- Click on Account from the drop-down menu.
- Scroll down the Account page until you reach the Profile & Parental Controls section.
- Click on the downward-facing arrow next to your specific profile name to expand the options.
- Look for Playback settings in the expanded list and click the Change button next to it.
You will now see a screen with two very specific checkboxes located under the “Autoplay controls” header:
- Autoplay next episode in a series on all devices: Uncheck this box if you want to manually select “Next Episode” or watch the end credits in peace.
- Autoplay previews while browsing on all devices: Uncheck this box if you are tired of loud movie trailers blaring at you while you are scrolling through the home screen.
- Once you have unticked the boxes you no longer want, click the blue Save button at the bottom of the page.
Updating Your Devices
The changes you just made will apply to every single device where you use that specific Netflix profile—including your smart TV, your Roku, your iPad, and your smartphone.
However, the change might not register immediately if the Netflix app is already running on those devices. To force the new settings to take effect, you may need to switch to a different profile on your TV and then switch back, or completely close and reopen the Netflix app on your phone.
Once the app refreshes, you can finally browse the Netflix library in total silence and watch television at your own pace.
