I couldn’t reach it with my PS3 last night.
That’s great but there are those of us who don’t use Twitter or Facebook, so they ought to be communicating otherwise. Their official blog and the official tech blog has no mention of the outage or the restoration of service. (I saw a commercial for a product that suggested visiting the company’s Facebook page for more info. Again, they could also communicate via a regular webpage for us luddites.)
And Netflix slides further into irrelevance. Not too long before they’re the WordPerfect of the video world.
What are you using instead of Netflix?
It seems to be up for us today.
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.
I’ll take that bet and spot you 5%. They will get barely any cancellations because of this. Not even close to 1%. Sure, if this becomes a regular thing but this hasn’t happened much if at all in the past. Did anything close to 15% of the subscriber base even have a problem? Most of their subscribers are probably totally unaware that there even was a problem because they weren’t trying or, like me, didn’t have any issues last night.
If they still offered the level of service they had a few years ago, I wouldn’t bet on any but a few grumps cancelling. As it stands, I think the rising tide of dissatisfaction with Netflix is such that a widespread outage on a family holiday evening is going to shake loose a lot of subscribers already on the edge. Look for a noticeable sawtooth in the graph when all the numbers shake out.
Amazon had a Roku Deal of the Day last week for $40. I have Blu-Ray streaming on one TV and got a Roku for the other TV. The Roku retrieves faster the Blu-Ray, and there’s been no buffering like sometimes happens with the Blu-Ray.
Question about Netflix – if you pay to watch (streaming), do you own or are you renting? I won’t pay just to watch once, but I’d pay to own.
Ah, I’m glad I wasn’t the only one. We just signed up for the 30-day trial on the 23rd, and then last night it kept telling us that we weren’t connected to the Internet, when clearly we were. It wasn’t looking good for an extension beyond the free 30 days. Now if it works tonight maybe we’ll forgive their Winter of Missed Content.
I’m glad I wasn’t the only one! I wasn’t able to access it through my TV, but it worked on my laptop, so I was concerned something was wrong with my TV. Relief!
I’m not sure I understand your question. For $8 a month you don’t really expect anything other than “renting” the movies for the durations they’re available, right? (you can watch them as many times as you want…until they yank them in favor of offering something else.) Over at Amazon you usually pay more than that to download a single video to own forever.
Owning movies isn’t all it’s cracked up to be; there are only a handful of movies we want to watch over and over again. Most movies I’m happy to watch only once or twice - I don’t need to own those.
My question was about the Netflix titles that want me to pay extra, even though I’m subscribed. Although now that I look for an example, I can’t find any. A couple days ago, Netflix was showing me titles with a $2.99 price tag.
I’ll get back to ya. 
Hmm. I know Amazon offers many episodes of TV shows for about that price and the occasional unpopular movie (to own, though. I own Haven and Hart of Dixie episodes that way), but I’ve never heard of Netflix pulling that. I’d love to see an example if you find one.
Never seen that either on Netflix. iTunes will also have rentals for around that price. When my wife first got the service, I was like, why the hell do we need Netflix? Now, I absolutely love it. The only issue I’ve ever had with Netflix, is there’s TV series and movies I want to watch that they don’t carry, but for $8/month, I can’t expect them to offer me everything under the sun.
How is it that Netflix was, reportedly, blaming their outage on the Amazon “cloud” infrastructure? What’s the intersection?
Amazon Web Services hosts the movies and other content for the Netflix streaming service.
I can. And what I like least about the service is there paltry selection. It looks very large when you’re simply scanning titles, but when you actually come up with a title on your own, and search for it, there’s maybe a 30% chance (that’s my guess, not a fact) they’ll have it. But I do search for lots of titles – I often search for titles that are recommended in threads here, not infrequently for every title noted in a thread for a subject area I like.
I just got this in my e-mail, and thought it might be apropo to the conversation…
Quasi
I’d probably pay upwards of $30/month or so for a service that gave me access to most everything under the sun. Still, with the movies they stream, I can find something I want to watch. If not, I just rent it from iTunes. I’m curious how the content from Amazon Prime compares, but I can’t get that on my streaming box, so I haven’t checked it out.