How To Disable Auto-play On Netflix

Video streaming services like to keep following you. One of the ways they do this is by offering useful content that they think you'll enjoy when you complete a TV show or movie and often go ahead and play it. 

Whether you ask it or not, before the credits even expire. You often need quick responses to prevent the next episode of a TV show from being played.

Netflix is ​​the most famous practitioner of the autoplay approach. In this article we will show you how to disable the automatic playback function of Netflix for the next episode on PC, mobile, tablet and smart TV. 

Disable automatic playback of the next episode in the settings

If you watch Netflix on a Smart TV, you may have searched in vain in the settings for the option to disable auto-play. 

But this is applied in the settings of an account that are not accessible on all devices: change the settings via the Netflix website and they will be applied throughout your device's line-up.

Open the Netflix website and log in to your account (if you are not yet logged in). Click on the drop-down menu in the top right corner and select Account. On the page under 'My profile', click on 'Play settings'.

Under Auto-play you will see a check box for 'Automatically play next episode' - this must have a check mark. Click to remove the check mark and click Save.

This setting is now applied to all devices on which you use the service, and in our experience this will happen immediately: we did not have to log out again on our Smart TV, for example.

As the wording of the setting indicates, what you have done is a certain element of automatic play is disabled: the way in which Netflix starts playing the next episode of a program when the previous one ends. 

You will still notice that Netflix enthusiastically starts playing content when you just look at the description page, and we don't know of a method to stop this annoyance. 

If you do that, we would love to hear from you. 

Netflix is ​​still automatically played on a different account

As we said, the autoplay settings for the next episode are adjusted per account, which means that if you switch to another account, even on the same device, you also switch to that account's autoplay settings. 

You will need to go to the play settings for each account you use, according to the instructions above, and disable autoplay for each of them.

Go to Netflix.com and click on the drop-down menu at the top right where we have previously selected Account. 

Click on your alternative account instead. Now click again in the drop-down list at the top right and select Account, then Playback Settings and follow the same method as above.

Auto-play on Kids-accounts

Until recently, the method described above did not work on Kids accounts, which for obvious reasons did not have the privilege to adjust their own settings, but less logically their settings could not even be adjusted via a related adult account. 

(Absurd you had to temporarily upgrade their account to an adult account, turn off auto-play and then roll it back to a children's account!)

Fortunately, Netflix has now changed this, and all you have to do is choose the Kids account (via the website as before, and via the drop-down menu at the top right) and go to Account> View settings and switch 'Play next episode automatically' off under Auto Play.

You will notice that a Kids account has far fewer settings than an adult account, so that they cannot tinker with all those many options. 

But you should keep in mind that it is possible for your children to automatically play the next episode again if they are premature and / or cheeky.