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What Netflix Could Have Said This Week

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Re: What Netflix Could Have Said This Week

#81

Post by RandallBrown »

ShawnJG wrote: post #40
ctdonath wrote: post #27

Unified queue. Regardless of media, business structure, delivery mechanism, company name, etc. methinks what all customers want is a single place to choose & queue content, filtered by whatever options they desire, delivered on whatever medium is available and they pay for via a spectrum of contracts (from unlimited-per-month to single order). Just make sure it's all on one queue. If multi-queue, then only because on…

Def unified queue. They are violating a golden rule. not giving the people what they want. They've lost the Value in Value Added Service. As of today there stock is down 40% from when this whole debacle started.

I believe it was Henry Ford who said "If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have said "a faster horse"."

Sometimes you have to do something that customers might not "want" to get to something that they really do want. If this lets Netflix improve their streaming service without being bogged down by dvds then I'll be all for the change.

Re: What Netflix Could Have Said This Week

#83

Post by rglover »

Regarding this suggested letter, the author is spot on with how this should have been handled. There's really little reason for taking the DVD portion of the company and rebranding it under a totally different (and poorly selected) name.

I don't understand why Reed and the rest of the team at Netflix are throwing away such an incredible business. Like any business that offers both old and new options, they should have merely announced a plan (much like what was suggested in this letter) to slowly phase out DVDs and educate their customers on the benefits of streaming (as well as developed a plan for making more DVD-only content available via the streaming service). This just feels like that scene in the Beach where the guy gets his leg bit off by a shark and is taken out into the woods to die slowly. Despite this mistake, I still love Netflix (it's my primary source of television save for torrents). I hope they can recover from this and really turn around the brand. If not, I'll be really sad if I have to subscribe to cable again.

Re: What Netflix Could Have Said This Week

#84

Post by Klinky »

AdamTReineke wrote: post #25
rumblestrut wrote: post #23

Reed Hastings makes me wonder what kind of company Netflix is. Does Netflix listen to its customers? I've hated the website redesign since it launched and from what I've read, I'm certainly not alone. I find the redesign to be much less user friendly than the old one, which I loved. I don't login as much as before to browse, review and add to my queue. I avoid the website and stick to watching stuff on my Roku. In my…

Netflix does listen to user feedback. Back in 08, the profiles feature almost got the ax before vocal user feedback convinced them to keep it. I'm sure they're listening, regardless of what the final outcome is. June 19, 2008 - Removing Profiles - http://blog.netflix.com/2008/06/profiles-feature-going-away.... June 30, 2008 - Nevermind - http://blog.netflix.com/2008/06/profiles-feature-not-going-a... (Work has any UR…

I don't consider pissing off a large portion of your customer base causing a backlash so strong that you backtrack to be "listening to customer feedback". It's more like "poking the hornets nest & getting stung". Netflix has a history of shooting first & asking questions later.

As far as giving feedback or suggestions voluntarily as a customer, good luck. You can't do it on the website & any suggestion you give to a customer service rep stays with the customer service rep & goes no further. It's a sad state of affairs when the best 1-on-1 communication with customers Netflix has had as a company is their CEO doing damage control in Facebook comment threads.

Re: What Netflix Could Have Said This Week

#85

Post by jmilloy »

A DVD-by-mail queue makes sense to me. What does "queue" mean in a streaming service, especially one where availability is frequently changing? In fact, DVD-by-mail and streaming services require and invite dramatically different management by the user.

I don't want a unified queue, because I don't want a queue for my streaming service. I can think of many ways in which I would want integration between my activity in each service, of which a unified queue is one of the least innovative and least helpful.

I have to believe that, even if Netflix/Qwikster can't provide useful integration, someone can. Despite my initial negative reaction to the split, these opportunities actually make me a little excited.

Re: What Netflix Could Have Said This Week

#86

Post by kalid »

c2 wrote: post #53
rumblestrut wrote: post #23

Reed Hastings makes me wonder what kind of company Netflix is. Does Netflix listen to its customers? I've hated the website redesign since it launched and from what I've read, I'm certainly not alone. I find the redesign to be much less user friendly than the old one, which I loved. I don't login as much as before to browse, review and add to my queue. I avoid the website and stick to watching stuff on my Roku. In my…

In my 3 or so years as a Netflix subscriber I have noticed an extremely disturbing trend of Netflix killing useful features simply because they aren't good for the business. I can think of 2 off the top of my head: - You used to be able to easily access a page of latest release DVDs. They killed this page because "too many people were using it" - and they had a pretty audacious blog post assuring that now it is a bet…

I cancelled my membership a while back also -- difficulty in finding content I actually wanted to watch was a huge factor.

It's almost like an insurance company -- they want you to buy their plan, but not actually use it! (Why, then they'd have to pay out to the movie studios!)

Re: What Netflix Could Have Said This Week

#87

Post by foulmouthboy »

Bud wrote: post #60
_pius wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other other difference is that iPad, iPod, iPhone, etc. actually describe their eponymous products ... iPhone? Sure. iPad? Maybe. iPod? Definitely not. It only seems that way because the iPod dominated the product category so strongly as to become synonymous with "portable digital music player."

Huh? The iPad is pad-shaped and "pad" is a commonly-understood noun in the tech world to refer to these devices. Same thing for iPod. It's pod-shaped (or was when it was introduced) and it's a pretty simple mental leap to classify this "pod" as a thing that you put your music "into". By stark contrast, "Qwikster" has absolutely no mental, cultural or conceptual link to the product or service it describes. It's worthl…

Oh I'm sure I could rattle off at least a hundred or so names of products and services that have no relationship to their relative products, are challenging to spell (assuming you hadn't heard of them before) and sound somewhat similar to other services.

Re: What Netflix Could Have Said This Week

#88

Post by kemiller »

ctdonath wrote: post #27

Unified queue. Regardless of media, business structure, delivery mechanism, company name, etc. methinks what all customers want is a single place to choose & queue content, filtered by whatever options they desire, delivered on whatever medium is available and they pay for via a spectrum of contracts (from unlimited-per-month to single order). Just make sure it's all on one queue. If multi-queue, then only because on…

Really? When you're not limited to a few out at a time, and when they don't have to be physically delivered to you at a cost of 1-3 days, does the queue per se really matter so much anymore? I can see a lot of different ways to represent saved content for a streaming biz, but DVDs pretty much force an ordering. I almost never use my queue for streaming.

But ratings are another matter. Seems like they could syndicate that data back and forth.

Re: What Netflix Could Have Said This Week

#89

Post by metageek »

kemiller wrote: post #88
ctdonath wrote: post #27

Unified queue. Regardless of media, business structure, delivery mechanism, company name, etc. methinks what all customers want is a single place to choose & queue content, filtered by whatever options they desire, delivered on whatever medium is available and they pay for via a spectrum of contracts (from unlimited-per-month to single order). Just make sure it's all on one queue. If multi-queue, then only because on…

Really? When you're not limited to a few out at a time, and when they don't have to be physically delivered to you at a cost of 1-3 days, does the queue per se really matter so much anymore? I can see a lot of different ways to represent saved content for a streaming biz, but DVDs pretty much force an ordering. I almost never use my queue for streaming. But ratings are another matter. Seems like they could syndicate…

> I almost never use my queue for streaming.

On my Blu-Ray player, the queue is the only way to play anything.

Re: What Netflix Could Have Said This Week

#90

Post by neworbit »

maratd wrote: post #66
BlazingFrog wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious, do you have numbers backing the higher profitability of their streaming business over DVD-by-mail? I do agree that, if they wanted to get rid of their original line of business without looking like that's what they were doing, this would be the best way.

> I'm curious, do you have numbers backing the higher profitability of their streaming business over DVD-by-mail? Simple reasoning will get you to that conclusion. There are no physical plants to maintain. No physical inventory to maintain. No postage costs. You do have the costs of bandwidth, computing power, and licensing fees. I would imagine those are less than the above. On top of that, they wouldn't be throwing…

For other similar* businesses that I'm aware of, streaming isn't more profitable on a per unit basis as compared to DVD rental/sale (but subscriptions to unlimited streaming are much more profitable, because usage tails off but people don't cancel).

* similar = streaming and disc media - it's the adult space, not mainstream video

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