<p>I’d happily move from DVD to streaming if the movies I wanted were on streaming. As it is, I have 52 movies on my DVD queue, of which about eight could be streamed.</p>
<p>Netflix is probably doomed, because the market they are good at – physical DVDs – is going the way of the dinosaurs and buggy whips, not to mention the fact that they just scuttled their own boat in that market, and the market they need to be good at – streaming delivery – they aren’t good enough at, and they are going to get worse before they get better when their Starz agreement expires this winter.</p>
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<p>Yes, and also the recommendations and the reviews-- are they going to split those as well? This is just a terrible idea, both in its substance and in its introduction.</p>
<p>I don’t care about DVDs. I just want to watch the movies I want to watch. Is there some other service that would let me stream them?</p>
<p>I watch things on hulu also sometimes amazon.</p>
<p>I just cancelled my account. Not worth it anymore and we have On Demand and Starz to use.</p>
<p>Over 10,000 posts so far to the Netflix blog, and I didn’t see a single positive comment in the few that I read. </p>
<p>I love Netflix’s ratings system and the depth of the catalog, but it’s going to take too much work on my part to keep up two separate queues. So now I’m torn. I do love having the streaming part, and I love the depth of the DVD catalog, but having them in two separate places is just awful. Especially since they move streaming content on and off the instant queue. </p>
<p>The email went to my junk mail, and I initially overlooked it even when looking for it, because the return address didn’t begin with “Netflix”. It’s probably going to sneak by a lot of people that way. And there’s no mention of it on the Netflix website itself. My respect for the company has just plummeted.</p>
<p>^^^Thanks for the clue to check my junk mail. I hadn’t gotten the email you’re all talking about. I also checked the website & there was no mention of it there. It just seems that Netflix is making a bad situation worse.</p>
<p>Not sure what we will do yet. We have just had the streaming option for a few months now, and we have a Roku. It is somewhat disappointing that not everything is available via streaming, but if there is something new to see we use Redbox.</p>
<p>I will have to check out Amazon and Hulu.</p>
<p>We tried netflix streaming out, but it just didnt work. It was so choppy it was unwatchable. We have no problem watching and streaming from anywhere else, just netflix and silverlight. netflix just blamed silverlight or our set up, and was no help. We just canceled after free trial.</p>
<p>I won’t be dealing with two websites because I’m cancelling my streaming subscription today. Last night we went through every single streaming offering and couldn’t find a single video to watch–it’s just filled with direct-to-video shlock. I agree that any organization that could name a product Qwikster has no idea what its doing–and I bet they paid some consultant a pretty penny for that name! (And isn’t streaming the “qwikest” way to get a movie, so shouldn’t that be the name for the streaming option?)</p>
<p>I’ve printed out a PDF of my queues and rental history, just in case Netflix doesn’t quickly rethink this. I’m thinking we’ll keep the DVD service, since that has the deep catalog. Then use Amazon Prime, Hulu, and maybe Vudu for streaming. Time to buy a Roku! I’ll miss the standing catalog of Netflix streaming offerings.</p>
<p>Hmmm…no email, either in my in or junk box. I did read most of the letter on CNN. Still have both DVDs and streaming, have come to use the streaming option more frequently. Would like to have both options at a fair price. Like others have said, do not want to have to maintain 2 queues on 2 different sites. What to do…</p>
<p>Stock dropped another $11.00. Maybe they are separating the two areas so that they can more easily sell the DVD business to someone else and concentrate on the streaming.</p>
<p>I think the guy is right about one thing, that people are ****ed off at their arrogance, but he is really grasping at straws if he thinks it is the way they announced the pricing changes and not the incredibly huge increases in prices for the same service. This clown and their PR department might think they are pulling a fast one that they intended two separate services for DVD’s and Streaming all along, that their mistake was not telling people, and that is hogwash. It is pretty apparent they basically decided to split the pricing to increase their revenue and this whole restructuring was done after the fact to try and molify people (their apology? basically that they are creating two new companies, each with its own separate organization and management, so they needed to create pricing models to support them being independent…). Either they have been planning to create two separate entities all along, which bogs the mind because why didn’t they just say this, or they created this as a smokescreen.</p>
<p>Netflix made a very big mistake, they assumed that people are so used to using their service that they won’t switch and figured for the convenience people would just eat the huge price increases (I can just see the morons in the marketing department, with their predictions that 'based on our studies, we predict that there is a probability that less then 5% of Netflix customers will quit if we raise our fees 60%; after all, where will they go?"). Someone there is living in la la land, and this so called apology isn’t going to sway many to look at Netflix positively, it is as lame and as false as the doofus who was running BP during thhe Gulf Oil Spill who complained about wanting his life back and then was saying “but I really care”…</p>
<p>Netflix is in a hard place, and there are a lot of things that are going to hurt them. They have competition through services like Amazon and Itunes, and their download service as others have pointed out is pretty lame (one theory about the price increases was to get people to switch to download only, which I suspect is cheaper to run, even with the server farms required [prob outsourced to a cloud vendor anyway] then the DVD model. </p>
<p>The real problem with streaming is that they are having trouble with the content providers because they are all clinging to the past, they want the model where they can sell millions of dvd’s, even at a relatively low price, and still make a fortune at it, and more importantly, they are afraid of download services. It is much like the record industry, that has fought digital downloads and it wasn’t until they saw that selling 20 CD’s was doomed that they finally bought in; the networks have bought in because essentially, getting their money from ad revenue, it pays for them to have it streamed. But for example, pay services like HBO refuse to allow on demand viewing by non subscribers, because they want people to pay X dollars a month more to get HBO (or whatever), rather then watch what they want (kind of like forcing people to buy an entire audio CD when all they want is a song). To keep streaming from gaining ground, the people holding the cppyrights are charging huge licensing fees to places like netflix, or not allowing it at all,which is prob why Netflix streaming is pretty lame. </p>
<p>Where the movie industry is screwing up is that by doing this, they are basically going to drive people to illegally share movies and such and they are going to take a bath, as they did with CD sales, until they figure out it is better to have download services paying them, then losing billions to pirates (this is what is going on in the recording industry). </p>
<p>There is another storm cloud on the horizon, there is talk that ISP’s are going to do what wireless carriers like ATT and Verizon have done, i.e data limits on your internet connection. If they set the limits low (I have heard numbers being thrown about that aren’t much higher then what they do with 4g data plans, i.e maybe 10 gig), it is going to kill streaming, period, because at high def you can blow 2 gig in an hour, so if your limit is 10 gig, watch 2.5 movies and you are at your limit…and then they start hitting you with huge overage charges. I am sure they are going to try it, the question now is how much data are we talking about?</p>
<p>The DVD by mail business is, in the long term, a dead end. Probably not really sellable unless that included the ratings/recommendation model. Streaming is the future, but it’s not robust enough. Especially here in the US, where download speeds rank #25 in the world, behind Romania, fercryingoutloud. Add in the anemic Netflix instant streaming catalog, and you’ve got a system that’s an up-and-comer but is certainly not a standalone entertainment source.</p>
<p>^^^ Excellent post, musicprnt! I am very p-o’d by the Netflix division and the lame way it was announced. And I fear that the latest price increase is just the first of many.</p>
<p>I, for one, was not livid about the price increase at all. Paying $10/month for the service I was getting was an incredibly good deal; paying $16/month for the same service was still way better than any alternative. And I certainly understood that if Netflix could barely make money with physical DVDs at $8/mo., it sure wasn’t going to have a robust streaming business for $2/month. </p>
<p>Netflix streaming doesn’t work perfectly all the time for me, but it works better than any other streaming source. And its streaming library isn’t good enough, but I have found plenty of stuff I want to watch in it. Including a few movies Netflix recommended to me . . . although mainly its recommendations are good for identifying movies I have already seen but not bothered to rate for them.</p>
<p>I am still, however, mourning my local indie video rental store that closed last winter, and that offered pretty nearly everything I wanted with instant gratification most of the time. Managing my Netflix queue doesn’t quite provide the same bang, and my wife completely hasn’t gotten the hang of it. And supposedly Netflix is losing a lot of its streaming content when its agreement with Starz expires in a few months.</p>
<p>I, also, have no desire to go back and forth between websites. I already hate it when I have to check Netflix and Hulu.</p>
<p>I wonder what my kids are going to do. Neither owns a TV – all of their video is via internet sources. (Most of which are probably pirated anyway . . . this won’t affect them that much, even though they have Netflix subscriptions.)</p>
<p>There is certainly a difference between my cyber friends on CC and my RL friends and neighbors. It seems everyone on CC uses the Netflix streaming feature while nearly all of my RL buds primarily use the DVDs. </p>
<p>Like JHS we werent surprised or upset with the fee hike. Most of us just cancelled the streaming feature (since we didnt use it) and kept the DVD service so no real $$ increase. But this changing to a new web site has EVERYONE seeing red and I dont mean the Netflix mailing envelope.</p>
<p>For some reason the things we want to watch streaming (Dr. Who and Castle) aren’t available on Netflix. Our TV hookup is so confusing and complicated it’s easier for me to watch DVDs. The main problem with our Netflix cue is that half the time it’s being rearranged by S2!</p>