Oh, we still have the streaming service, but after 5 or 6 years we let the disc service go. There isn’t really a good flat-rate streaming service to replace it yet, but at $8 a month it’s worth keeping.
Netflix is a frustrating example, because they completely pwned the home video world, and could have continued to do so, but like WordStar, WordPerfect and a hundred other “kings of the hill” without serious competition, they’ve managed to bumble one thing after another. A lot of their changes seem to come directly from the CEO’s chair, based on whatever whim strikes him (“Let’s rename our core, signature business to another name that’s already trademarked by someone else because the future is streaming, someday!” “Let’s jack prices around incomprehensibly because, I dunno, we haven’t change anything recently!” - etc.)
What really killed NF for us, and I think many, is their new-title policies. It’s bad enough to have to wait 30 days after the rest of the video world for titles to become available, but then the wait to actually get a new, hot title could be weeks or months as well. I seem to recall the head of NF boasting that they bought copies to fill every peak demand; they’ve clearly stopped doing so. Instead of any of the five or six available new titles, which were usually behind a dozen not-available-yet titles, we’d get the crap from the bottom of our waitlist, stuff we wanted to see someday but not right now. So I cleared all the waitlist stuff out and they just didn’t send anything - any of the newer titles that had been out for months and shipping for weeks. So, enough, we dropped the disc plan. There just weren’t enough older titles to make it worthwhile.
Having a major streaming outage on Xmas Eve is, I think, going to result in a sharp drop in subscriptions. I’d bet on 10-15% cancellations as a direct result.
The streaming plan is just barely worth keeping for the older TV show library and the occasional film that actually is on the stream. These days, though, we watch 1-2 movies from Vudu a week and thus pay about what we were paying for the 3-disc plus streaming plan, with more flexibility. We would watch Amazon stuff except that we don’t have a streaming box that handles it and have to fire up the media computer - a Roku box to replace the Blu-Ray streamer is probably in the works.
So our current system is Netflix streaming for what it has, Vudu for pretty much everything else, and Amazon video for the in-between.
I will always retain a warm spot for the company, though, since I bought into them at $21 and got out at… well, it keeps me from actually hating on them.