Oh, you Netflix fuckers.

The BBQ Pit
#1

Other than the throttling thing, I’ve always held Netflix up as an example of a good company. It’s a good service, no fuss, no muss. I liked that they decided to just give us the Watch Instantly feature. My favorite part, though, was the profiles - I get a queue, he gets a queue, we have one for drama TV shows, one for comedy shows, etc. It’s easy and we always get the next DVD we want, instead of ending up with two of his war movies and three DVDs of the same show. And if I had kids, I could give them their own queues with the rating they’re allowed to watch and they could autonomously pick their own and not bug me about it. Beautiful. Ideal.

So of course they’re getting rid of profiles. Mother FUCKER.

So now after September 1, I’ll have to constantly check the queue - I’m sending back two movies and a show, so we need to make sure that disc 2 of the show is first and then a war movie and then a documentary, etc, etc, etc. We’re on the seven at a time plan because it works so well for us. We don’t go to movies, we rarely go to bars - this is what we do in the evenings! We spend a lot of money on Netflix!

And then they make it damned hard to complain! You can’t find a mailing address or an e-mail address; you essentially have to call. So I call and ask, hey, maybe there’s another queue management system coming up? No. It’s a business decision. So since you’re taking away something that I consider part of the value of the service and not replacing it with anything, it’ll be cheaper? Um, no. The guy did at least dig up a mailing address for me to send a letter to.

Argh. I’m just pissed and sad about it. I guess it was kind of expensive - the different queues were sort of like different accounts, all printed seperately. Why mess with a perfectly good service, though, that I’ve recommended to so many people. “My kids fight over who gets the next one.” “Profiles!” “I hate getting the shows and the movies all mixed up.” “Profiles!” “I don’t want to watch The Guns of Navaronne again.” “Profiles!”

Sigh. If you want to complain, the corporate address is:

100 Winchester Circle
Los Gatos, CA 95032

#2

You’re on seven at a time and you’re bitching about “ending up with two of his war movies and three DVDs of the same show?”

I hear the world’s smallest violin in the distance…

Joe

#3

Yeah, you just wait until it’s New Year’s and Gerald Ford dies again.

We’re on seven at a time because we like to have selection at home; it’s not exactly selection if it’s volumes three four and five, is it?

#4

I got the same notice yesterday. I looked at the “Questions & Answers” page referenced on the website. In “answer” to the question Why? [Why eliminate the Profiles feature?], it said something close to “in order to constantly improve service for our customers.” Seriously. So, what the fuck does that mean?

I got mad enough to call the number and wait seven minutes on hold to talk to somebody. The guy I talked to told me it was because a) the Profiles feature is somehow a real programming “stumbling block” that makes it difficult to program some other features they’d like to add; b) only a small percentage of the customers use the feature; c) they made a business decision to give up on feature in order to have several others. Well, at least that’s not as meaningless as what it said on the “Answers” page.

Can I add another complaint? I’ve written about twenty times asking them to correct the synopsis for a single movie. No action. I can only guess that nobody actually reads the messages. (Probably doesn’t help that the last six times I closed the message with “Fuck your mother!”)

Just for fun, see if you can spot the inaccuracy in this description for the movie Kingdom of Heaven (2005):

#5

We drive by the headquarters every day on the way to work (a super-secret detour that gives us a carpool on-ramp lane to 85, that only we and a few thousand of our closest friends know about).

I can cuss like a sailor out the window on your behalf as we drive by tomorrow, if you like.

I can’t say that they’ve ever really raised my ire though. Just some petty stuff.

We’ve been waiting for the first disk of The Stand for months and months now. Just buy a few more copies, y’all. The 2nd disk came and went back unwatched.

Yesterday a mysterious documentary arrived, that neither I nor Mrs. WeHaveCookies recall putting in our queue. She thought it was mine and had moved it to the top of the list. Anyone seen The Real Dirt on Farmer John?

#6

Weird. I know I’ve e-mailed them in the past, to bitch when they were mailing DVDs the day after they received the ones I’d sent back. According to this article from 08/07 they’ve changed to call centers from e-mail.

I’d rather call a customer service phone number myself. Sorry to hear about your beloved profiles, though.

#7

They didn’t have newspapers in those days. It took him a while to hear about it.

#8

I’ve never actually seen it, but presumably he goes to Jerusalem, and isn’t actually from Jerusalem…

And why would he be fighting off Christian invaders?*

*Presumably this is the one you meant.

#9

1099 was the second to the last year of the of the 11th century? If that is what you’re referring to, I read the excerpt as Bloom’s character arriving on the knightly scene sometime after the Crusaders’ 1099 occupation.

#10

The Consumerist article about this says that the call center folks are advising people email the ‘Suggestions’ web form.

#11

I’ve rated 848 movies under my profile on the account I share with my girlfriend. According to their website the information will be lost and there is no way to fold that information into the main account or to transfer it to a new account. As soon as they stop playing soothing music at me and take me off of hold I am going to have some words with them…

Ah here we go. They don’t know. Great.

#12

Wasn’t the Bloominator helping to repel the Saracens? It’s been a while since I saw that movie so apologies if I’m totally off the mark.

#13

Haven’t seen it, but I know it’s a documentary on the founder of Angelic Organics, which is a large community-sponsored agriculture (CSA) farm in this area. They’re very popular.

#14

Also, he wasn’t actually a peasant, was he? I vaguely recall him being of a higher caste, but living a lowly life. Perhaps I’m misremembering. It’s been a while, and the movie was fairly forgettable.

#15

It’s supposed to be a good documentary; might as well watch it, right?

I sent an e-mail, mailed a letter, AND called.

#16

The stated case that profiles are tough to program around is bullshit. It shouldn’t be hard, if that’s the problem, to just create separate accounts for each profile, and then create some fictional billing plans so that the charge stays the same. This wouldn’t be exactly the same, but it should be close enough that the main uses of profiles (ie, separate queues, separate ratings) are preserved.

My first thought on the topic, after getting the email, was that they’re removing it because separate profiles let people game the system. If you just put a single movie in one of the profiles, they’ll actually send it to you (although you may have to wait a day or two).

#17

I’ve seen The Real Dirt on Farmer John! Definitely worth throwing in your queue, IMHO. But I’m keen on documentaries in general.

I’m so glad someone else is irritated with profiles going away. I have a Netflix account with just one queue. But my husband has two profiles in HIS account - one for the stuff he wants, and one for TV series that we both want. My queue has the movies I want to see. We’ve just gotten married, and I’d toyed with the idea of having him set up a 3rd profile so I could put my movies on that (and ratings lost be damned). Obviously we won’t be doing that.

But having to manage movies we both want, TV shows we both want, and our own separate desires without having profiles is kind of a pain in the ass. I suppose we could create a third account with them for our joint stuff, but jesus. That’s also a pain, and would cost more than just having one account, many discs, multiple profiles.

Hey, there’s the rub. Husband has 3 discs at a time - one profile is 1 disc, the other profile is 2 discs. I’d bet (and I’m too lazy to check) that the 3 at a time is cheaper than a 1 disc subscription plus a 2 disc subscription. They’re “losing” money on him.

:frowning:

#18

So quick to call bullshit. Maybe you think they’re taking out a feature people like just to be assholes? And they’re all upstairs giggling over the misery they’ve recated?

Not all IT systems are created perfectly, it’s not always easy to do things that sound simple from the outside. At my company we have all kinds of stumbling blocks of things that **should ** be easy but aren’t because of past decisions.

#19

I agree with this pitting. Profiles are one of the things that make/made Netflix cool. If their system just can’t hack it, they should come up with some discount for multiple accounts. I bet at least half of the people pissed about losing this are women whose husbands watch war movies …

#20

Or men whose wives watch girly crap. That was my motivation. :wink:

Well, I’ve been meaning to cancel for a while now, since we 1) tend to let the movies sit around for 3 months before watching them, and 2) we now live across the street from a video store. I actually looked up my rental history and figured out that we average almost 1 movie a month, so we have been paying somewhere in the ballpark of $16 per movie. I know, we could switch to a cheaper plan, but I think our interest has waned to the point that even that’s not worth it.

And the profile thing is kind of annoying. Making a crappy change and then claiming you’re doing it “to improve service” is corporate bullshit and deserves to be punished. So I just canceled my account*.
*Actually, I dropped it to the $5/month plan and will leave it that way until they confirm receipt of the movies that I have out, because if you cancel your account and the movies get lost in the mail, they charge you for them, whereas normally you just report a mailing problem and they forget about it.