The Oatmeal isn’t exactly the Encyclopedia Britannica…it’s a joke! And it’s a funny one!
I’ve never found the Oatmeal funny, to be honest. :o
Their 52 week high was only 2 months ago!
Right. The stock was over 300 just before they announced the price increase, and has lost more than half its value since then.
The whole thing bums me out more than anything. I love the service, love the product, and have been scaling back on cable and setting up streaming in most of the rooms of my house. Hopefully someone there actually knows what they’re doing, but it sure seems like misstep after misstep.
I’ve never read it before and even if the joke as a whole wasn’t that perfect if Qwikster takes a dump I can see “Qwikster: the Friendster of Netflix” catching on (or something along those lines).
So far this has not affected me negatively. In fact, the price drop was nice. I don’t care about streaming and in my queue of 120 or so DVDs, I think maybe 5 are releases from the last 3 years. So, in theory, shunting off the streaming shouldn’t affect me at all.
However, I know how these things go and have little optimism that the service I’ve been used to will continue forward. This “Quixster” thing will get bought out, the company will be overhauled into bankruptcy (with a few last-ditch desperate price hikes) and then the DVDs will be sold for scrap. And there will be no option for me to have such a vast movie library at my fingertips. I’ve seen some really obscure and interesting films due to Netflix. Where will I turn to? Redbox??? Are you kidding? You think Redbox has Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion or Reborn from Hell: Samurai Armageddon?
The common wisdom is that the DVD-by-mail service is a dinosaur that’s going to be extinct soon enough. I doubt that and here’s why.
First, because of the first-sale doctrine, Netflix can rent any DVD it can buy. Before it can stream a movie or television series, it has to negotiate rights. When they started to do this, they scored deals like the one they had with Starz. (My understanding is that they bought streaming rights for all of Starz’ content for something like $25 million per year.) Now of course, these deals are a lot more expensive and complicated; at worst they might have to negotiate on a movie-by-movie basis. Most recent movies are not available for streaming through Netflix, although they are via other services.
- Second, even if Netflix could overcome the rights issues, I don’t see how, technically, they can make all 100,000 plus of their DVDs available for streaming. That would require massive amounts of storage and bandwidth. Currently, I think they stream only about 10,000 titles.
So I wouldn’t be so quick to write off the traditional service. Any thoughts?
I quit Netflix when I lost my job, but they have periodically sent me emails to rejoin. I wont be going back. I’ve heard there is this new service called Quikster I might try out instead. Seriously, I hardly ever used streaming. There wasn’t enough selection for the kinds of movies I watch and it’s probably only going to get worse. Streaming is the future -say 2015 or so. I think DVD by mail is the now, and Netflix just signed their own death certificate.
Well I can’t imagine they were sitting in the board meeting and someone thought, “This will be a huge inconvenience for customers. Genius! The market’s going to love this move!” More likely, they had the foresight to see some huge pitfalls in the near future and realized that a single Netflix with both services might not have been viable in the long term.
Yeah. I wonder if that’s how they thought it would break. Of everyone I’ve heard dropping their service over the split, none have decided to keep the streaming side.
The speculation I heard was that the content providers may have wanted to change the streaming license fees to a per subscriber basis making enabling streaming for all customers very expensive. My own crackpot theory is that, as long as streaming and the DVD service were all in the same company, content providers would be able to manipulate Netflix through the streaming rights. The only way to avoid it is to spin off one half of the company.
There’s more than one email from Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, ya know. The other emails explain his explanation and clarify his comments while clearly laying out his vision for the future of Netflix, etc.
I was wondering why this emu egg showed up in my mailbox.
Hi. Nice to meet ya. Apparently I’m an island. 
I’m definitely keeping the streaming side but, checking out my DVD queue, I think I might also go to The Other Side–for a while, at least. People have been complaining that it’s just* too hard* to go to two different websites to manage their viewing. Were they the same ones explaining how “old folks” will stay with DVD’s because they can’t figure out the challenge of streaming? Proud owner of a Roku here! (Oh, I am old enough to want to minimize clutter; it comes from having cleared out the homes of deceased relatives. I’ll buy the very best stuff but refuse to make room for everything.)
If somebody comes out with a better streaming service, I’ll switch. Without clutching my pearls & exclaiming at the tragedy of my life…
I’m actually considering dropping our service. We’ve had the 2-DVDs-at-a-time plan and rarely find the time to watch them, so they linger literally for months. Streaming selection really stinks, as well. So we aren’t getting even the lower price worth of service.
What are some alternatives that work? We don’t have an internet-ready TV but we do have a Wii box that can access Netflix at least. I don’t think it works with Amazon however.
Will that be a steaming, er, streaming dump?
A CNN.com article on the controversy: http://www.cnn.com/2011/09/20/tech/web/netflix-reaction/index.html?iref=obnetwork
I wonder what is going to come out of the Zediva suit.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/08/02/idUS317363613120110802
By setting up huge dvd farms for streaming directly from the DVD, it seems to me that they are essentially combining the low content costs of buying dvds, with the low delivery costs of streaming. I think it might be a good idea for Netflix to buy Zediva. It will takes years before the lawsuit reaches a final decision, but if they win, it will be worth many billions of dollars to netflix.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/17/technology/personaltech/17pogue.html?pagewanted=all
Why would Netflix want to buy Zediva? If what they are doing is judged to be legal (streaming DVDs remotely), then Netflix can just duplicate that. They already own a vast DVD library, and they know how to stream content.
Because I doubt that Zediva has enough cash to survive years of law suits. There might be some other way to transfer the money to keep Zediva afloat. There will also probably be some heavy lobbying expenses to keep the studios from amending the copyright laws to make what Zediva whats to do illegal.
I don’t know if Zediva owns any patents for what they are doing.
According to the headline of your article the federal judge shutdown Zediva. If Netflix bought them or even were found to have provided them support, it would probably have a hugely negative impact on all future licensing negotiations with the studios. Netflix would end up with even less content unless they somehow prevailed in the suit.