Tastes like New Coke?
And Crystal Pepsi.
If you are saying that you suspect that not moving was the plan all along, I wondered about that myself.
But do note that New Coke was a real mistake. It tested better than Pepsi in blind taste tests. But it was much less popular in real life.
How are they saying that? Was New Coke a trick to make us want classic back? Is that widely held idea. I don’t get it.
If it was a stunt, it was a very expensive one. The OP story says stock value is down 60% since July.
I’ve heard it before. New Coke was, allegedly, brought out for people to hate. So when they brought back Coke Classic it was when they replaced sugar with HFCS.
Yea, thats the rumor , that it was some sort of marketing ploy to have people talk about how much they liked the old product, and then flock back to it when Old Coke was brought back to the market. As BigT notes, the story is probably false, but Coke did get a boost over Pepsi after the New Coke fiasco, even if they didn’t actually plan it out.
So I was guessing Netflix was floating the idea of separating the two services (which seemed like kind of a stupid idea on the face of it) to A) get people talking about something other then their recent drastic price hike and B) Get people talking about how much they liked the old service. Plus, the idea that they never really ment to launch Qwikster would also explain why they gave it such a stupid name.
As with all things, in reality its probably just a Corporate blunder rather then Machevllian CEOs playing twelve dimensional chess, but a marketing ploy at least seems plausible.
There is no way it was a stunt. Netflix is just having idiot issues. They will probably survive all this, though. It’s just a weird time for them.
I think thats due to the large price hike for the streaming service that was announced early in the fall, rather then the Qwikster thing. They ended up loosing a decent chunk of subscribers over the former.
This sounds like conspiracy theory nuttiness. In there OPs linked story there’s a line that sounds like a bit of all-to-rare honesty from a corporation.
I can understand why the bean counters would want to make that move. The issue was that the rest of the management didn’t do their due diligence to determine if it was viable. It pretty clearly wasn’t, but if the DVD business is dragging the company down this could get worse before it gets better.
What was the plan for people who stream only anyway? When I search a title now and it is not available for streaming, it shows me the DVD of it and says for $7.99 I could add DVD’s the account.
I wonder what it would have said if Netflix became stream only. “We don’t have that for streaming.” OR “We don’t have it streaming, but Qwikster does. Go there and look it up or click this link to go there and sign-up!”
It would have been ridiculous.
Yes, it would have been ridiculous but moved them towards what might have been their ultimate goal, which some people believe is to spin off and sell the DVD business and own only a company that offers streaming.
I’m fairly PO’d. I was a big fan, I defended the Quickster shit. This is just abominable. We have streaming but rather than being a rabid fan of Netflix I’ve shut up about it.
Still worth it to rack up a big queue and pick something out off of it; it doesn’t work at all to look up a particular title and be disappointed when it’s not available. If anyone’s been to a Redbox recently they’d know how insanely shitty their selection is.
That said, we have Amazon Prime which we use heavily for buying things but will now look at for their video offerings.
I do wish Netflix would have kept my physical disc queue. I used that for release dates of DVD’s. I was going to use it for going to Redbox to pick up a disc once in awhile.
Uh, I’m streaming only now, by the way.
This plan to seperate the disc service from the streaming service was such a huge blunder, that I am having trouble believing that Netflix really thought it was a good idea. (Hmm, let’s piss off a big chunk of our customers by raising the costs, THEN lets piss them off more by making them sign into two different places and manage two different queues. Sure, that’s what they all will do.)
There had to be something more going on. Set up that way was just asking to drive people to use streaming OR disc, not both. I’m still leaning towards option 1.
It seems the possibilities are:
- Netflix was moving towards selling off the disc side and moved to soon after the cost increases. We will see a new form of this plan in 6 months or so.
- This was an attempt to redirect customer ire away from their cost increases. “See, we DO listen to the customers. We canned this silly plan because you all demanded it.”
- It was an attempt to get back stock value. Take a bit of a hit because of the announcement to split. Win back support when you drop the plan. A stock market edition of the second option.
Just about anyone could look at the plan to split off DVD service, and see that it was going to lose more business than it would save.
I’ve had Amazon Prime for years–I buy a bunch of stuff & quick shipping at Christmas is reason enough to keep it.
Not impressed by their streaming video selection. I’ll stay with Netflix until something really better comes along.
Netflix is getting killed by content owners and are trying to figure out how to keep the streaming business alive at all.
How about adding these to your list:
4) Netflix maxed out the number of streaming subscribers their contracts would allow. The split was an attempt to remove the DVD-only subscribers that never stream so that they could service new streaming customers.
5) The DVD business is very expensive and weighing down the streaming business. Jettisoning the DVD business would allow them to stay profitable and keep subscription rates low while paying increased streaming contracts to the content owners.
This picture, http://imgur.com/4FRxU, sums up my feelings (well except for the sign-off).
I’m tickled by the idea that we should be thankful to a company that discovered and successfully exploited a market. They didn’t offer low prices and ship to our homes altruistically; they did it because it made them money. And lots of it.
No one cares if you’re thankful. The point is it remember what was available to the consumer before Netflix and what we’ll get after Netflix dies. Then everyone can go back to crying about Comcast again.