Netflix is Bi Polar

[pmcd9]

I think that Netflix has tired of being successful.  They seem hell bent on killing the goose that laid the golden egg.  I was thinking about dumping them before this bs.  Can anyone suggest an alternative?

Dear Paul,

I messed up. I owe you an explanation.

It is clear from the feedback over the past two months that many members felt we lacked respect and humility in the way we announced the separation of DVD and streaming and the price changes. That was certainly not our intent, and I offer my sincere apology. Let me explain what we are doing.

For the past five years, my greatest fear at Netflix has been that we wouldn't make the leap from success in DVDs to success in streaming. Most companies that are great at something – like AOL dialup or Borders bookstores – do not become great at new things people want (streaming for us). So we moved quickly into streaming, but I should have personally given you a full explanation of why we are splitting the services and thereby increasing prices. It wouldn’t have changed the price increase, but it would have been the right thing to do.

So here is what we are doing and why.

Many members love our DVD service, as I do, because nearly every movie ever made is published on DVD. DVD is a great option for those who want the huge and comprehensive selection of movies.

I also love our streaming service because it is integrated into my TV, and I can watch anytime I want. The benefits of our streaming service are really quite different from the benefits of DVD by mail. We need to focus on rapid improvement as streaming technology and the market evolves, without maintaining compatibility with our DVD by mail service.

So we realized that streaming and DVD by mail are really becoming two different businesses, with very different cost structures, that need to be marketed differently, and we need to let each grow and operate independently.

It’s hard to write this after over 10 years of mailing DVDs with pride, but we think it is necessary: In a few weeks, we will rename our DVD by mail service to “Qwikster”. We chose the name Qwikster because it refers to quick delivery. We will keep the name “Netflix” for streaming.

Qwikster will be the same website and DVD service that everyone is used to. It is just a new name, and DVD members will go to qwikster.com to access their DVD queues and choose movies. One improvement we will make at launch is to add a video games upgrade option, similar to our upgrade option for Blu-ray, for those who want to rent Wii, PS3 and Xbox 360 games. Members have been asking for video games for many years, but now that DVD by mail has its own team, we are finally getting it done. Other improvements will follow. A negative of the renaming and separation is that the Qwikster.com and Netflix.com websites will not be integrated.

There are no pricing changes (we’re done with that!). If you subscribe to both services you will have two entries on your credit card statement, one for Qwikster and one for Netflix. The total will be the same as your current charges. We will let you know in a few weeks when the Qwikster.com website is up and ready.

For me the Netflix red envelope has always been a source of joy. The new envelope is still that lovely red, but now it will have a Qwikster logo. I know that logo will grow on me over time, but still, it is hard. I imagine it will be similar for many of you.

I want to acknowledge and thank you for sticking with us, and to apologize again to those members, both current and former, who felt we treated them thoughtlessly.

Both the Qwikster and Netflix teams will work hard to regain your trust. We know it will not be overnight. Actions speak louder than words. But words help people to understand actions.

Respectfully yours,

-Reed Hastings, Co-Founder and CEO, Netflix

p.s. I have a slightly longer explanation along with a video posted on our blog, where you can also post comments.

[greenkoolayd]

blockbuster?
amazon on demand?

[Victoria Waterfield]

Books?

[pmcd9]

blockbuster?
amazon on demand?

I don't know, I'm asking you.

Books?

Oh, a wiseguy.   I have been reading lots of books I'll have you know.  Comic books count, right?

[wombat]

I buy a lot more books now that I can get them immediately on my Kindle. And the Tech Staff watches a lot more movies now that he has discovered Netflix Streaming. We are going to cancel the mail service when they split, because I can live without the thing where I get a disc in the mail and it sits around for a couple of months before I watch it. We do still have a Blockbuster in the neighborhood for things that aren't available for streaming. I wonder if their business will get better now or if we are an exception.

[pmcd9]

Their DVD service is still viable because so much is still unavailable on streaming.  I don't know why this is.  If you could obtain their entire library via streaming I would cancel the DVD service.  And the Blockbuster up the street is no substitution.  They do NOT have the movies I want to see.  But it's probably a good solution for someone like you who hardly watches any movies.

I don't like the price increase, but I would support it if they bulked up their instant library.  Just a guess, but of all the items they have available I'd say that only about 15-20 percent is available streaming.  Do the other services have such huge gaps in their streaming library?

I don't even know if this is Netflix fault.  But as the industry leader in this type of service they should be leading the way to solving this basic problem.  And I'm not seeing it as that being the case.

[jay-ell]

I've looked into the other services, and even after the price increase, Netflix is absolutely the most content for the money, based on the shows I want to watch. But I also don't watch many movies, I mainly stream TV shows, and usually older ones at that. Netflix really seems to cater to nerds -- lots of sci-fi and documentaries -- which suits me fine. But I've looked into Amazon VOD (since we have prime) and they don't have as much of the stuff I want to watch as Netflix. They have very little, in fact, that isn't duplicated on Netflix, and they don't (yet) stream to my xBox, so they're of little use to me.

We seriously considered Hulu Plus -- we got a free trial and everything -- but we'd basically be paying $8/mo for 30 Rock, which we do get (just barely) over our antenna, but the picture is pretty bad. And last season, Netflix started adding 30 Rock episodes to streaming 3 days after they aired on NBC, so we were able to keep up with it that way if we missed it on broadcast.

I'm irritated enough about the queues not being integrated that I'll probably drop DVD services, though the game rental portion does give me pause. But we do like Wombat, movies sit around here for ages when they do come, so I'm thinking RedBox is the better option, on the rare occasion we do want to rent something. And, of course, we can rent movies through Zune on the xBox for a few bucks a pop, and we don't even have to get off the couch for that, so now that I think about it, screw RedBox, we'll probably just do that. Bigger selection anyway.

But yeah, physical media....ppphhhhhhhhhhhhttttttttttt. Who needs it*.

_{*Not applicable to old, dusty books}

P.S.: How much you wanna bet Quickster gets sold off within a year?

[wombat]

When I logged into Amazon today there was a long message about a whole bunch of new stuff they'd just gotten rights to on their streaming service.

[jay-ell]

I will have to re-evaluate this, then.

[theinevitable]

I read a guy somewhere explaining that this split will be really good for their streaming service, because now they can negotiate contracts with the studios separately from the physical media side. I forget the whole reasoning, and conveniently cannot find the reddit post.

[littlefallsmets]

Netflix doesn't like the profit margin on the physical DVD thing and is trying to figure out a way to kill it without admitting that they did it on purpose.

Making it look like a massive miscalculation instead of a purposeful tactic is an attempt to piss off less of their customer base along the way to killing the act of actually mailing DVDs.

There is no other logical conclusion I can wrap my mind around.

[Nabubrush]

Just posting because I want this to show up later but I'm not even going to read this now.

[CortJstr]

I'm sticking with Amazon. I'm paying for Prime anyway so I might as well use their streaming service through my Blu-Ray player. If it ever integrates with Tivo, all the better.

I read the same thing tI did. Apparently studios were realizing nobody buys DVDs and were strong-arming Netflix, trying to delay things coming out until well after the DVDs' sell dates. Doing things like "if you want this movie on streaming you have to carry the rental-only DVD with no special features. You get the DVD 3 months after it's on sale and the stream 2 months after that. Otherwise no deal." Because legally, Netflix could just buy the real DVDs wholesale and rent them if they wanted but they have to negotiate streaming rights. Splitting the companies up makes it harder for the studios to do this kind of negotiating.

[wombat]

If that's the case it makes sense, since the only reason anyone needs both mail and streaming is that things aren't all available on streaming. There's no reason to be mad that the mail service isn't part of the deal anymore if you can get anything you want on streaming. Assuming this is how it eventually turns out.

[pmcd9]

If that's the case it makes sense, since the only reason anyone needs both mail and streaming is that things aren't all available on streaming. There's no reason to be mad that the mail service isn't part of the deal anymore if you can get anything you want on streaming. Assuming this is how it eventually turns out.

That may be the case eventually, but it's not the case right now.  And I'm not mad, I'm just a consumer looking for a better deal