How much business has Netflix actually lost due to the price increase? Are people really cancelling their accounts weeks before the change just because they are pissed off?
Well, I switched down to streaming-only already, mostly because I don’t trust myself to remember to do it several weeks from now, and also because we haven’t been using the DVD part of the service much anyway.
An article I read yesterday cited two polls which both had 40% of respondents saying they’d cancel. It wasn’t well documented though so I don’t know if it’s “cancel one facet of the service” or “cancel everything”.
If it was “cancel everything”, I’d honestly assume a bad polling sample or people just taking the chance to get a zing in against Netflix without sincerely planning to cancel. 40% seems a bit high.
Well, according to posts on this board and another I frequent, quite a few, I’d say. Also, the two message boards are not anything alike.
If they count it like Feedflix, there’s a whole lot of single episodes of TV shows. If I don’t like Cagney & Lacey, 125 episodes won’t interest me any more than one episode does.
Will we see actual figures or just accept what people are claiming all over the Internet? How many here have actually cancelled Neftlix? Or plan to cancel it? (Really, only an idiot would cancel this far ahead.) More of us might just pick the method we prefer & drop the other.
(Somebody who really cares could start a poll.)
Why? Maybe you don’t want to give Netflix an extra ten bucks regardless of what a “great value” it’ll be for this month. If you were going to cancel anyway, you might as well save your ten bucks for some other thing.
The idea is to weed out those people who aren’t profitable. It’s like when AT&T started capping downloads. The people who download under the limit aren’t going to cancel and the people who do download will cancel and AT&T doesn’t want those customers anyway.
By getting people to go streaming it’s cheaper. No need to hire people to handle the DVDs, it all becomes about a file and once that’s good to go, just back it up and it’s forever unlike a DVD which is subject to abuse.
Ditto.
Except many people who say they’re dropping the DVD option are doing so because they rarely use the DVD part of their subscription. They were essentially free money for Netflix since they were only causing Netflix to handle a DVD once a month or so, if that but still pay a couple bucks over the streaming-only subscribers.
They do indeed. They charge for DVDs, VHS tapes, audio cassettes (!) and CDs. I think the cassettes and CDs are fifty cents for seven days.
Checking the library site it looks like it’s 2.00, not 2.50.
http://www.memphislibrary.org/about/libraries/popcollection.htm
A T & T has started capping downloads???
If I was locked in a room with Instant Watch I could find many things to stream. But most of the catalog seems like movies I would find as I flipped around on the cable channels. Movies I might watch if I was sitting around the house bored. Not movies that I’m excited about seeing.
The catalog may work for individual people who can watch whatever they want in their preferred genre whenever they like. But if you’re trying to find a movie for the whole family, the catalog is lacking. The kids want to see recent movies.
Most people want to see a new movie. The problem with so many old movies in the streaming catalog is that someone in the family has likely already seen it. It’s extremely difficult to find a good streaming movie that no one in a family of 4 has not already seen.
I would LOVE to go all-streaming, but the more recent movies aren’t available on streaming. I wish the studios would get up to speed on that and get over themselves. Of course, streaming is useless if I can’t get the full HD quality I would’ve had on the Blu-Ray disc (which is WHY I bought Blu-Ray in the first place - I wanted the improved pic quality!)
I have to think that Netflix has noticed a decline in the demand for new release dvd’s due to Redbox and Blockbuster Express. People are more likely to grab a disc, like “True Grit” for example", from a kiosk rather than wait for Netflix to get it to them. I’m not saying that this is true for most subscribers, but maybe enough of an effect to be noticable to them.
Yes, of course adding a digital streaming service is smart for the future. When they did that nobody complained as it was a free addition to your DVD plan. But knowing that they are going to continue to try to push all of us into an exclusively streaming plan has people disgruntled with the company. Why are they doing this? Because as you stated, it is much more cost-efficient for them to stream a movie file than to buy and ship a disc.
However “because it’s cheaper for our company” is never going to be a compelling argument for why a consumer should throw away their DVD or brand-new Blu-Ray players and start streaming a bunch of old B-movies and TV shows that they’ve already seen or didn’t care about enough to catch when they were originally released. The content is not there yet for their streaming service to replace DVDs.
Their DVD service is not even any longer everything it should be after they traded away new DVD releases for 30 days in exchange for more streaming rights. To me, that was the first sign that Netflix was more than willing to sell-out their DVD customers to build their streaming service.
So unfortunately everyone who switches to the DVD-only plan should know in advance that Netflix doesn’t really want you as a customer. They want you to cancel and switch to their streaming service and they will only continue to push you to do so.
Right now the prices for the two services will be the same. Why is there not even a $1 discount for bundling both? Because they don’t want you to choose both. They want you out of DVDs ASAP. And I’m sure there will eventually be another little price nudge on the discs down the road to make people question why they would now pay more for DVDs than they could for streaming?
The other annoying thing is how they were totally cool with their pricing plan while they were driving Blockbuster, Hollywood, and countless other ma and pop video stores out of business. And now that most of their competition is gone Netflix is complaining about how their current pricing plan is not sustainable. For those on this board arguing that Netflix is not technically a Monopoly I agree with you. They aren’t. But somehow that hasn’t stopped them from behaving just like one.
Here’s a quote from their CEO, Reed Hastings form back in 2005 http://www.inc.com/magazine/20051201/qa-hastings_pagen_2.htmlthat is interesting in this context, “Netflix has customer loyalty; it’s a passion brand. I’ve always thought trying to change consumer behavior is scary, and most companies that promote that fail.”
Ditto. My library is free and you can keep the DVD for a week. Some of the DVDs
are in very bad condition, but usually cleaning with soap and water will fix it. I also have an old external HD-DVD drive that seems to be much more tolerate of media problems.
I checked and the nearest Blockbuster is 9 miles away. The nearest RedBox is in walking distance and there is a second a mile away.
Blockbuster has closed nearly all their stores in my city.
I imagine it’s like that many places.
With their biggest competition beaten Netflix can crank up prices all they want.
You are absolutely right in saying that for many customers the changes at Netflix suck. But Netflix has to consider their own perspective as well as the customers they serve, or they won’t be around to do so in a few years. The fact of the matter is that you will be streaming all your content in decade. You may prefer to get it by renting discs, just like some people preferred cassette tapes over CD’s, or Beta-max over DVD, or radio over television, but that manner of receiving content is going to disappear soon. Both DVDs and Blu-ray discs will become a niche market for collectors and videophiles, and renting them out in masse will cease to be profitable.
So from Netflix’s point of view they are currently heavily invested in a rapidly dying industry. So they are phasing out of that business and re-investing their resources into a growing industry. In hindsight we would view a company that was dumping resources into compact cassette tape manufacturing in 1989 as foolish. Especially foolish if they had CD factory they weren’t investing in.
The next several years will suck for just about everyone, but eventually all content: new, old, niche, etc., will be available for instant stream. Netflix knows this so that’s where they are putting their money.
I’m perfectly comfortable with that. In fact, I’d prefer that to the DVD model. However, their streaming selection still isn’t there for me, so I’m sticking with DVD instead. There seem to be two types of Netflix consumers: those who think of a movie they want to watch and go to Netflix to get it and those who want to a watch a movie and use Netflix to find one. Group A is the disc crowd and Group B is the streaming crowd. I’m in Group A and until they get the streaming library up to speed in a way that I’m satisfied, I’ll stay there.