What Netflix Could Have Said This Week • Hacker News Board

Re: What Netflix Could Have Said This Week

#101

Post by _pius » Wed, Sep 21, 2011, 2:38 AM UTC

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…

What does a "pod" have to do with playing music? Less than what being "quick" has to do with a DVD delivery service, in my opinion.

Not saying I like "Qwikster," but it's just not the case that the word "iPod" sounded like a music player before Apple made it famous.

Re: What Netflix Could Have Said This Week

#102

Post by spullara » Wed, Sep 21, 2011, 3:14 AM UTC

metageek wrote: post #89

kemiller wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As far as I can tell, the only reason to have the streaming queue at all is for the brain dead integration that some devices do. For instance, my TiVo requires the queue but my Apple TV does not. For that reason alone I use the Apple TV to watch Netflix streaming as the two step process isn't good.

Re: What Netflix Could Have Said This Week

#103

Post by spullara » Wed, Sep 21, 2011, 3:16 AM UTC

neduma wrote: post #77

Impressive discussions. I like the Spotify model compared to Netflix. Care to comment?

The Spotify streaming model is the same as the Netflix streaming model. They just have far fewer licenses. What do you see as distinguishing characteristics of Spotify over Netflix beyond available content?

Re: What Netflix Could Have Said This Week

#104

Post by aridiculous » Wed, Sep 21, 2011, 3:28 AM UTC

lubujackson wrote: post #74

An interesting point about the name Quikster - they took the ONE weakness of the DVD by mail service (you have to wait a few days) and made it the centerpoint of their name. Completely tone-deaf branding. Not to mention archaic domain naming (-ster? Friendster was a long time ago and doesn't have a nice shine anymore). I don't work in marketing, but I couldn't imagine much worse unless they tried on purpose. Maybe "S…

It's easy to remember but that's about it. It literally could describe anything: oil change service, magazine publisher, board game company.

It's kind of refreshing to see such a textbook, illuminated lesson in bad management in the tech world, when usually all we get to see are the all-stars.

Re: What Netflix Could Have Said This Week

#105

Post by GBond » Wed, Sep 21, 2011, 3:49 AM UTC

kalid wrote: post #86

c2 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!)

I agree. They push the lower level movies intentionally.

I've stopped trusting the Netflix so-called "Latest Release" and other lists a while ago and started using http://instantwatcher.com for this reason. Good filtering & sorting features.

Re: What Netflix Could Have Said This Week

#106

Post by DannoHung » Wed, Sep 21, 2011, 4:10 AM UTC

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…

Unified queue nothing. I was talking with Adrian Cockroft at QCon last year and he said that Netflix would prefer to not have a queue for Instant Watch at all.

Re: What Netflix Could Have Said This Week

#107

Post by absconditus » Wed, Sep 21, 2011, 5:21 AM UTC

People would have bitched no matter what they said. The level of entitlement in modern society is pretty shocking.

Re: What Netflix Could Have Said This Week

#108

Post by iradik » Wed, Sep 21, 2011, 5:50 AM UTC

Change the implementation, not the API.

Netflix broke their API with their customers, so they're gonna be confused and upset. No explanation, no matter how good, will fix that.

It's like when you write a long comment in some code to explain why your code is goofy. Just fix the code!

In this case netflix needed to make their site more usable and make the pricing distinctions between streaming and dvd more clear.

New company, new prices, new billing options. Wayyy to much info for your avg customer. Netflix is way too confident if they think, customers won't cancel their plans with all these questions being raised. Once a customer starts to think about all these options, they might just think I don't really use Netflix much anyway!

Re: What Netflix Could Have Said This Week

#109

Post by iradik » Wed, Sep 21, 2011, 5:50 AM UTC

Change the implementation, not the API.

Netflix broke their API with their customers, so they're gonna be confused and upset. No explanation, no matter how good, will fix that.

It's like when you write a long comment in some code to explain why your code is goofy. Just fix the code!

In this case netflix needed to make their site more usable and make the pricing distinctions between streaming and dvd more clear.

New company, new prices, new billing options. Wayyy to much info for your avg customer. Netflix is way too confident if they think, customers won't cancel their plans with all these questions being raised. Once a customer starts to think about all these options, they might just think I don't really use Netflix much anyway!

Re: What Netflix Could Have Said This Week

#110

Post by iradik » Wed, Sep 21, 2011, 5:50 AM UTC

Change the implementation, not the API.

Netflix broke their API with their customers, so they're gonna be confused and upset. No explanation, no matter how good, will fix that.

It's like when you write a long comment in some code to explain why your code is goofy. Just fix the code!

In this case netflix needed to make their site more usable and make the pricing distinctions between streaming and dvd more clear.

New company, new prices, new billing options. Wayyy to much info for your avg customer. Netflix is way too confident if they think, customers won't cancel their plans with all these questions being raised. Once a customer starts to think about all these options, they might just think I don't really use Netflix much anyway!