Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Netflix kills Qwikster

allthingsd.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 165 posts

Re: Netflix kills Qwikster

#71

Post by matwood »

dpark wrote: post #58
matwood wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Handbrake on OS X. The latest SVN version usually worked with most movies.

Thanks. I was hoping since you had an Xbox, you were ripping on Windows. I've used HandBrake on OSX before, and it worked great. I just wish the Windows version would handle DVDs the same.

I have an ATV2 for streaming movies from the mac and netflix streaming. The xbox360 only plays games and occasionally plays DVDs - I think I rented a movie a few times from xbox marketplace and it worked fine.

I thought about getting a ps3 for the BRD functionality and games, but at this point I don't want to deal with any physical media. Even if the 1080p is better, I've never looked at the movies streaming through the ATV2 to my 46" LCD and thought the 720p picture took away from the movie. Then again, I'm old enough to remember being the human remote control for my dad and I still have an old tube TV in the bedroom :)

Re: Netflix kills Qwikster

#72

Post by derekprior »

dpark wrote: post #39
CognitiveLens wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the strongest criticisms of current cable TV is that their selections are not fine-grained enough (e.g. I don't want to pay for HGTV and ten other useless channels just to watch the Discovery Channel). I don't think the one-size-fits-all approach works well with entertainment media.

The solution to that seems (to me) to be to charge, e.g., $50/month flat, and pay the content owners based on usage. So if you don't watch HGTV, they don't get your money. This would allow access to all the programming without requiring that you pay for what you don't use.

The dirty little secret is that most of these channels are very cheap. The only expensive ones are ESPN and other sports programming. People who dont watch sports subsidize those that do.

Re: Netflix kills Qwikster

#73

Post by uptown »

smoyer wrote: post #19
uptown wrote: post #5

While this rights the ship, Netflix made the colossal mistake of rocking the recurring-billing boat. Smart businesses know that when you've got a customer setup for recurring monthly billing, there's a certain percentage of these customers who will continue to pay even though they're not actively using the service. Part of it is laziness of figuring out how to cancel. Another part is the thought that they may someday…

We switched to the streaming-only plan before our billing cycle and have been happy ... We weren't good at quickly watching the DVDs and returning them anyway plus we saved a buck a month. How did other HNers respond to the price hike? I would expect this group to be dominated by streamers anyway.

I canceled DVD delivery after the price-change ... then streaming after the Qwikster was announced. I did the math, and determined that Amazon and Apple offered everything I needed in a pay-as-you-go structure that made more fiscal sense to the way I watch movies with a much better streaming selection.

Re: Netflix kills Qwikster

#74

Post by yoda_sl »

ascendant wrote: post #62

Netflix made a bad decision, listened to the complaints of their customer base and reversed course on said bad decision. Not sure why that's such a huge ordeal.

Simply because doing some research will have yield the same results without a public embarassment! Netflix is quite a big player in user focus group and testing different scenario before launching new features, but in this case: total FAIL. Netflix constantly do major A/B testing on their web site to see if any minor changes had impact on their users. They even have a conference room for getting user focus group together and watch folks going over some new Netflix features... Looks like none of that experience was used in the Qwikster case.

Re: Netflix kills Qwikster

#75

Post by yalogin »

mathattack wrote: post #60

Great companies can overcome Marketing mistakes. Coca-Cola was one of the world's great marketers. How else can they get you to pay so much for water + sugar + a jolt? (And how do they charge more for water than Exxon charges for gasoline?) They made a huge blunder in the 80s abandoning the classic formula, with a New Coke that was better by all objective measures. Despite all their market research telling them how g…

It did reverse its decision but it did a lot of damage in the few weeks. First it kind of jolted people into rethinking their DVD subscription and more importantly gave people a reason to look at their competition in streaming. Amazon delivered the killer blow in my opinion. Their kindle bundled with media made Netflix reconsider quickly since now many people will see they are getting a better deal with Amazon even in the streaming realm (even they have no idea what Amazon's content will look like).

Re: Netflix kills Qwikster

#76

Post by rfairfax »

SoftwareMaven wrote: post #48
rfairfax wrote: post #25

What's going on at Netflix? If you ask employees, they'll tell you that the culture - often praised for its high performance standards - is a culture of fear. It's a product management-driven organization where PMs aren't afraid to use the poor performance card to remove subordinates who don't go along with their ideas. The emperor has no clothes. In Netflix's case, the emperor is any product manager. It's no wonder…

I would hope Netflix would be a product management driven company. Companies that aren't make far more stupid decisions than companies that are. I'm not sure what that has to do with the rest of your post. The culture of fear, OTOH, is problematic in the extreme. It doesn't matter what the organization looks like if people are afraid to do and/or show their research for fear of pissing off the powers that be.

My point on the company being PM-driven was not that PM-driven on its own is necessarily bad. The point was that the organization responsible for ideas and their execution (in Netflix's case, product management) combined with a culture of fear is a bad thing. It means that ideas are not challenged or questioned to the extent that they should. Apologies for not making that clear ... and no offense to product management as a discipline or career choice.

Re: Netflix kills Qwikster

#77

Post by blhack »

monochromatic wrote: post #56
blhack wrote: post #37

The tone on this one is quite a bit different: http://blog.netflix.com/2011/10/dvds-will-be-staying-at-netf... The email that came a few weeks ago actually had me stop what I was doing and read it (I was walking in to grab coffee, and I stopped outside to finish the email). That message was full of excitement, and started with a proper "Dear Customers: I screwed up". Why haven't I gotten an email this morning saying…

Why would this move cause you to cancel your service?

I cancelled my service when they announced qwikster.

I was in the "Meh, I'll keep this around because it's only a few bucks a month, and, well...they do have all of the firefly episodes. Maybe the selection will get better eventually."

I wasn't really using netflix very much, and the qwikster announcement caused me to re-evaluate wether it was actually a service I wanted.

I have a feeling there was a lot of people in my shoes that cancelled.

Re: Netflix kills Qwikster

#78

Post by brianbreslin »

dpark wrote: post #39
CognitiveLens wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the strongest criticisms of current cable TV is that their selections are not fine-grained enough (e.g. I don't want to pay for HGTV and ten other useless channels just to watch the Discovery Channel). I don't think the one-size-fits-all approach works well with entertainment media.

The solution to that seems (to me) to be to charge, e.g., $50/month flat, and pay the content owners based on usage. So if you don't watch HGTV, they don't get your money. This would allow access to all the programming without requiring that you pay for what you don't use.

@derekprior is correct, ESPN runs like $2.85/month vs USA Network which is like $.60/month. (this is what comcast pays them to broadcast it to you).

Re: Netflix kills Qwikster

#79

Post by robert_nsu »

smoyer wrote: post #19
uptown wrote: post #5

While this rights the ship, Netflix made the colossal mistake of rocking the recurring-billing boat. Smart businesses know that when you've got a customer setup for recurring monthly billing, there's a certain percentage of these customers who will continue to pay even though they're not actively using the service. Part of it is laziness of figuring out how to cancel. Another part is the thought that they may someday…

We switched to the streaming-only plan before our billing cycle and have been happy ... We weren't good at quickly watching the DVDs and returning them anyway plus we saved a buck a month. How did other HNers respond to the price hike? I would expect this group to be dominated by streamers anyway.

I'm streaming only. It boils down to me not watching enough TV to justify the two. I might spend 3 hours in one evening consuming some form of media, but I have to decide whether I want to play a game or watch TV.

Re: Netflix kills Qwikster

#80

Post by mathattack »

yalogin wrote: post #75
mathattack wrote: post #60

Great companies can overcome Marketing mistakes. Coca-Cola was one of the world's great marketers. How else can they get you to pay so much for water + sugar + a jolt? (And how do they charge more for water than Exxon charges for gasoline?) They made a huge blunder in the 80s abandoning the classic formula, with a New Coke that was better by all objective measures. Despite all their market research telling them how g…

It did reverse its decision but it did a lot of damage in the few weeks. First it kind of jolted people into rethinking their DVD subscription and more importantly gave people a reason to look at their competition in streaming. Amazon delivered the killer blow in my opinion. Their kindle bundled with media made Netflix reconsider quickly since now many people will see they are getting a better deal with Amazon even i…

If you are getting mocked by the Onion - then yes indeed, there was some damage. :-)

http://www.theonion.com/articles/netflix-switches-over-to-co...

Post reply on HN