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I work in Sunnyvale. Maybe we should arrange a picket Netflix Dopefest. You can bring cookies. 
I don’t watch war movies, but I watch lots of MST3K, and my wife watches an excessive amount of McCloud’s Daughters.
Having two queues lets us be asynchronous, so we don’t have to keep rearranging the top of the queue. The implementation of the profile system seems a bit of a hack, since I’ve never been able to figure out how to switch between them, but I can’t imagine how maintaining n virtual queues could prevent them from implementing anything.
On my account, the spot in the upper right where it shows my name when I’m logged in has a little triangle next to it indicating that it’s a popup menu. When you click there, it lists the other profiles and you can switch to them.
It’s a pain in the ass if you have more than two, though - for some reason it’s a bitch to switch between them sometimes and I have to go back to the “main” account. Himself just gets confused and leaves it up to me to fix.
Thanks. That’s one less reason to think coding around two profiles would be a problem.
Well, they have a financial motive. Some of the people who were using two profiles might now buy two accounts.
I’m a software developer, so I’m well aware of bad design resulting in things that should be easy being very difficult. I just don’t believe that they’re incapable of creating a new full account with the data from a profile. All that would require is dumping the data to file (they can do that, since they use the data to generate their web pages), creating a new account with custom data (I’m not sure they can do this, but I think that I could write a python script that would do it through the web interface if no other way) and create pricing plans for 1 and 2 discs at a time that add up to 3.
It wouldn’t give quite the functionality that the profiles do, but I just realized that if you were on the 6 at a time plan and went to two 3 at a time plans, it would actually be a tiny bit cheaper. A 2 and a 4, on the other hand, is a little more expensive than the 6 (3 seems to be the threshold for “economy of scale”.)
We don’t use profiles on our account. We pretty much enjoy the same things, and it doesn’t really bug either of us if 6 of her picks come in a row, or 6 of mine.
So how do they functionally work? Is it like this?:
Queue for Profile A:
Flic 1
Flic 3
Flic 5
Queue for Profile B:
Flic 2
Flic 4
Flic 6
Netflix delivery order:
Flic 1
Flic 2
Flic 3
Flic 4
Flic 5
Flic 6
Because if that is how it works, they would be greedy bastards indeed not to consider such functionality as a value-added service and instead try to bilk you for a 2nd subscription.
And as families/households are composed of more than one unique individual, they should see the ratings data of each person/profile as being valuable to them as well as to their customers, and enouraging people to rate the same movie different ways under the same account if they so desire, not taking that away.
Profiles essentially act like different accounts. I send back a “my profile” DVD and I get the next one in MY queue. They’re entirely seperate queues - it just depends on what you send back. If he doesn’t send back his movie, he doesn’t get his next one.
ETA - one of the great things about them, I understand, is that you can assign ratings to your profiles - for example, Junior’s profile cannot rent anything over PG, or whatever. And then you just let Junior go at it, and there’s no “Mom, I was supposed to get the next one” or “Mom, it sent the wrong one!” or whatever - Junior is free to manage his queue as he likes and you don’t have to worry that he’s getting a bunch of adults-only movies.
Ah ok. I still don’t think they have a leg to stand on if they want to monetize that with 2 separate accounts, not without selling what corporate soul they have left.
I don’t use the profile feature. However, I have noticed that many of my series discs are taking longer to ship. I’m wondering if perhaps by putting disc one of a series in one profile and disc 2 in profile number 2, disc 3 in profile 3…etc might interfere too much with Netflix’s ability to keep a decent number of series discs available to ship. Especially if several discs in a series are all shipped at once, then held until the weekend.
I assume they use a big database for this, so all they’d have to do is create a new entry for the new account, and copy over the old profile. It would take new coding, but it shouldn’t be too hard. Maybe they have no good way of verifying the connection between a new account and an old profile.
We’re going to merge everything into one, which will be a pain. It would be much better if they just added everything in queue B to the end of queue A. Reordering will still be easier than manually searching for everything on your old queue, since I don’t know of any way of doing mass queue additions.
I think I will call and tell them how braindead they are.
Why would you do that, when you could just assign 3 of your DVDs to the profile that has those three discs?
That was in response to dalej42 up there. You can move your “allotment” of discs around - if you want three of your DVDs to be from that show, you can get them if you have the “space” for them, it doesn’t matter what profile you’re using.
My husband and I did the profile thing after we got stuck with multiple discs from Krzysztof Kieslowski’s The Decalogue and didn’t hate life quite enough to actually watch them. For a couple months if I remember correctly. So we set up one profile with serials, TV, and such and the other with regular old one disc movies so we’ll always have something to chose from.
This really really sucks. Managing our queue is going to be such a bitch. Damn you, Netflix! And to think I wanted to have your babies… Wait, what?
How odd! I have a separate 1 disc queue for series and I’ve had the first disk of the Decalogue for a couple of months now. I feel I should watch it because it’s so highly regarded by the critics, and I have an interest in Polish film and culture.
But anyway, I’ve kept a separate queue for series so I get the discs in order while still having something on hand to watch other than the series.
I use the instant watch feature quite often, but I’m getting tired of it. Good films are rather thinly spread among the dreck. Plus, the last few months they’ve been adding new titles only rather slowly.
The Netflix call center is here in town and I have a bunch of former co-workers who went over there when our center went tits up–I’ve emailed a friend to find out if there’s any inside dope or any workaround for it.
I just wish they’d get shut of the stupid DRM issue that necessitates having IE7 in order to view instantly and that has such a problem with certain ranges of nVidia cards…
We had to do a stupid amount of work to get the media computer my boyfriend built (we call it TiFaux) to play the Instant movies on a TV. Evidently the player doesn’t like the idea and thinks we’re criminals. Had to do some dumb workarounds. It’s nice having the Instant movies to fill in the gaps when there’s nothing else around - we just finished the “Carrier” documentary that was recently on PBS with that, and we saw “King of Kong”, and I’ve been idly watching “The Duchess of Duke Street” too. I wouldn’t pay just for that service, but it’s nice.
I just went to my account window, selected “movies you’ve returned” and printed out the whole list as a PDF. 16 pages. I’m not sure why I did that, but anyhoo, I have my rental history now.
If Blockbuster Online were on the ball (which they aren’t) they would set up profiles on their site. Point to how they respond to customer’s wants and needs and steal some customers.
Profiles were (hopefully are again someday) a godsend for roommates sharing one netflix account. No jostling to get your movie on top. Each pay your amount and pick out the movies. It’s really too bad they are phasing it out. And, honestly, I can’t imagine anything else that would be produced because of the removal of profiles would be anywhere near as useful.
pat