It's hardly expensive
And a great service.
Netflix has canned Qwikster and will be bringing in the spun-off DVD rental operation back into the company's main business. "We are going to keep Netflix as one place to go for streaming and DVDs," CEO and co-founder Reed Hastings blogged today. "This means no change: one website, one account, one password… in other words, …
They finally got the right idea, the customer didn't like where they were going, it was a burden on the customer, and the customer can just as easily go to someone else for entertainment.
I'm a NetFlix customer. I rent DVDs, not movies on demand. While MOD is the way, some of us simply do not have the bandwidth to get our movies that way. If I did, I would be getting them from Dish or some other means. So, the cost increase didn't effect me in the least. But, making me get my DVDs from some something called " Qwikster", well, I can just as easily go to BlockBuster or one of the Dollar per movie places local to me instead of dumping me to another name.
Hell, if your spinning off the the means by which to get movies, name the MOD Qwikster and leave the DVD portion alone. The person making these decisions is just an idiot and I'm sure by the loss of customers he's staying up late at night regretting his decisions.
RIP NetFlix. There's always something better and if you make it difficult, everyone will notice. Nice job of boosting your competition, he should have bought stock in BlockBuster and RedBox first.
I cancelled 2 weeks ago. The qwikster thing was brain-dead stupid, and IMO, Netflix doesn't have enough streaming stuff available to make it worth the $9 a month. But then, I'm cheap and only watched 2 or 3 DVDs a month. $9 for streaming AND a single DVD was a decent price considering how little I used it. $15 isn't.
I'm about to cancel my streaming service. There is nothing new there, and delivered DVDs seem to be the way to go if I want to see something released in the last 3 years. Maybe streaming would be a better bargain if instead of raising only raising prices they added content and making searching for it from console devices as simple as the netflix website.
am I to be stuck at one movie at a time?
I have plenty of bandwidth for streaming, but find the selection kind of sucks, however I prefer to get multple movies at a time and then veg for a few hours on the weekend.
Kind of hard to do if I have to pay $16 and get only one movie a week.
Guess I will stick to the local redbox machine for now.
Any pointers to a site like groklaw, but with more focus on the purely business side mistakes? I'd love to see analysis of Nokia, HP, Netflix, Borders and the like, with "where they went wrong". Right now it's looking like far too many managers having been sneaking peeks at "Capitalism for Dummies".
"Price rises were always on the cards: streaming rights are costly to acquire, and the process is far more complex than buying in DVDs"
Ye-es, but that credits Netflix with too much altruism. Realistically, they want to push people away from the DVD model, as the overheads (postal costs, say 10% losses of discs etc) are much lower with streaming. Of course, while they are encouraging people to stop renting DVDs, they're also encouraging people to stop using Netflix altogether. Mission... accomplished?