There are tens of thousands of secret codes that will give users full access to everything on Netflix.
The site usually requires users either to search for an exact title, or to flick through a few limited genres that the site’s technology has guessed they might like. But new websites show that there are codes that can give access to the full list of all of those genres, allowing people to choose from the various, very specific categories that the site offers.
The site has genre categories that are as precise as “visually-striking films for ages 5 to 7”. But they might otherwise never be seen, because Netflix only chooses a very limited number of those genres to display, based on what users have previously watched.
Those same genre pages can be accessed using the secret codes, however. Each of those pages is given its own ID — and sites on the internet document those various ID numbers so that they can be easily accessed.
Each of Netflix’s genre pages exist at a specific idea. If you want the aforementioned spectacular films for young children, for instance, you can head to http://www.netflix.com/browse/genre/2851— and those final four digits can be swapped for different IDs if you are looking for something else.
To find the specific pages, you can flick through the unofficial sites that exist online. One site called Ogres Crypt hosts a list of films by genre and sub-genre, as well as a more extended one, and a Google spreadsheet lists them in ascending order by their ID code.
Because the trick requires going to specific pages, it will only work on the website. That means that it isn’t possible to do it on other hardware like an Apple TV, games console or smart television — though of course it is easy to find a film on a laptop and then search for it specifically on whatever other hardware you have.
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