This Is How You Disable Netflix’s ‘Are You Still Watching?’ Feature

The scene is all too familiar: A lazy day full of glorious binge-watching, when Netflix displays the dreaded message of “Are you still watching?”

Honestly, we could do without the reminder of our unproductivity, so here’s how to get rid of that pesky pop-up. According to Netflix’s help page, this prompt was designed to prevent you from losing your place in a series or unintentionally wasting internet data due to inactivity. It appears after watching three consecutive episodes or 90 minutes of uninterrupted viewing, whichever comes first. It is a feature of autoplay that only appears when you haven’t interacted with the remote controller. 

Lots of users enjoy falling asleep to Netflix, which makes this feature even more annoying. Some purposefully leave a show running to entertain a child or calm a pet. When paying for unlimited streaming access, why should you have to dismiss the message after such a short period of time?

One solution is to disable autoplay. The downside is you will instead need to manually select “Next Episode” to keep your show rolling.

On the browser-version of Netflix, sign into your account and hover your mouse over the profile icon in the top-right corner. From the dropdown, choose either “Account” or “Manage Profiles.”

From there, look for the profile you want to edit. If it’s not showing up, try “Profile & Parental Controls.” Under “Playback Settings,” uncheck the box next to “Autoplay Next Episode.”

For the Netflix app, sign into your account and select your profile. In the bottom right corner, tap “My Netflix”. Tap the profile name, then “Manage Profiles,” then the profile you want to edit again. Toggle the switch next to “Autoplay Next Episode”. Finally, if you are using an Apple device, you must tap “Done” to save your changes.

No matter if you change this setting on a browser or app, it will apply to all of your devices. However, it is important to note that it only applies to the profile you selected, and for the change to be account-wide, you must edit each profile individually.

Considering that Netflix can use 7 GB of data per hour when streaming in 4K, autoplay can drain your internet provider’s data allowance quickly. If this is a concern for you, simply choose your desired data usage and streaming quality while you’re in “Playback Settings.”

When following these steps, you might notice that Netflix also has an option to turn “Preview Autoplay” on and off. This is not to be confused with regular autoplay. Instead, it allows Netflix to play short clips of movies and TV shows while you browse their content menu. If this is something you find bothersome, it’s easy to toggle off at the same time you edit autoplay.

If you want to preserve the benefits of autoplay without seeing the pop-up, the only other solution is to install a browser extension. While this won’t fix the problem in the app, you could work around the issue on a Smart TV by casting your computer screen to it.

First, navigate to your preferred browser’s extension store, like the Chrome Web Store or Firefox Add-Ons. Use the search bar to find one that fits your needs and has positive reviews. “Netflix AutoSkip” and “Netflix Skipper” are two that advertise being able to remove this particular message. Download and give it a try.

Happy binging!