In fact, they already announced that despite having a really good first quarter this year, they expect the rest of the year to not be as good. Not that they will be unprofitable, but it's always damaging to the stock price for profits to stay the same or go down, rather than grow at a good clip.
Excellent, that's what I thought I recalled reading. That will work for me just fine. Streaming, while it'll be missed, was a luxury time waster. Although I was thinking of streaming ST:Voyager when that news broke just days ago, oh well.
It's not "all gone" it's just going to cost more. It's just a price increase. It happens. Seen the price of gas lately? Individuals will have to make the choice whether it's worth it or not, and many will cancel, that's how the market works. Netflix has calculated that the amount of people that leave will be offset by the increase in revenue from the price increase. Are they right? Time will tell. I think more troubling is this news: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2388343,00.asp
Re: Oh Netflix, I Knew It Wouldn't Last From what I've observed they dropped a ton of TV shows I had in my streaming queue. I suspect many of those were Sony properties. All of those shows now have "unknown" status.
If I find them gutting the instant streaming to the point where there's nothing left I want to watch, I will cancel. Pretty simple decision, there!
Re: Oh Netflix, I Knew It Wouldn't Last If they've having contract problem with the studios, this may become a non-issue as people will simply drop the streaming options as there won't be anything of value to stream. (I'm sure that would make a lot of ISP's happy.) I noticed oddly enough that my rate will not drastically change if I stay with the plan I have right now, which is unlimited streaming plus 4 DVDs at a time. It's only going to increase $2 a month. So it would seem this price increase is somewhat "regressive" in nature. And if I dropped streaming, I could actually save $6 from my current price. And if they lose their catalog, I may very well do that.
Same here. Right now I have a ton of stuff that I watch on Instant, but if that changes, I'd be willing to drop it. The good thing about Netflix is that they make it really easy to halt your service if you don't want to use it.
I've always taken "The customer is always right" to mean that you don't actively confront and correct a customer even when they're wrong, because that's likely to upset them and maybe cost you a sale. It's not meant to be literally true. It just means that when the customer is wrong, you either skirt the issue or find a diplomatic way of handling it without actually saying they're wrong.
Thought in one of the other threads, there was a running tally of things dropping off vs things being added? Know they've been having trouble with studios as well, and dropping things that way. For example, i heard good things about Dexter, and wanted to start watching it. Got through the first 4 episodes, and now Dexter is no longer available for streaming. No problem (annoyance, really) if you have the DVD plan also (they supplement each other nicely, as you stream older stuff, get the dvds for newer releases), but since they are separating them, and they aren't equal in ability, it's a tougher choice. Streaming has the convenience, but no newer titles, and plenty of stuff available as a DVD just isn't on streaming, even older stuff you would have expected. Star Trek JUST showed up there, you'd have thought that was a no-brainer, right? DVD limits you with the turnaround time, so you can really only get 1-2 discs a week, max. Also puts you 'on the clock' to watch something and get it back, doesn't always work with the schedule. Might be busy during the week, and then want to plow through 5-6 episodes of something, which you can't really do with one disc. Since Dexter fell out of the streaming queue for me, only thing on there for me at the moment is Stargate SG-1, which I've been slowly working my way through. Not really worth the $8 a month to keep watching that, especially if I can buy the whole series for $75 or so, and own it forever without having to keep paying to watch them. I was pretty happy with the service, and $15 a month for dvd and streaming was working for me. Couple movies a week, and SG1 episodes here and there when i felt like it. That plan's now going to $20 for me, and not feeling like it's worth it as much. It's a buck a movie for Redbox, including Blu-Ray (netflix wants another $2 a month for that, even Blockbuster had that for free as part of the fee), and those come out a month before Netflix gets them. Plenty of other options for watching TV shows or buying them, so less excited by Netflix's offering. And since even the defenders in this thread are all talking about a huge looming bill that Netflix is going to get from the studios, there's basically no way that prices don't go up again soon. I joined around Thanksgiving, and this is already my 2nd price increase, up about $7. Cost has gone up 60% for me so far, and if Netflix is about to pay a bunch more to the studios, that'll pretty quickly go up again. Since keeping my plan is basically signing up for 2 different ones (why no bundling, again?), when they raise plans a buck, you can bet it'll be for EACH plan...
And that if it's over an issue that's not going to make or break you, it's worth occasionally taking a hit and helping the customer if it seems like an honest mistake on their part. Lose a little money here and there, but you more than make it up by keeping loyal, happy customers. Obviously don't run yourself into the ground, but if you are a little more lenient rather than nickeling and diming the customer, they'll be back again and again, and tell others how great you are. LL Bean is a great example of a company like that. Their return policy is, in a word, stupid. They'll take back anything they ever sold, no questions asked, will fix it for you, give you a new one, or give you back what you originally paid for it. You'd think that would crush a company, but people will spend more money there knowing they stand behind their things, and the stuff is usually good enough quality that you never return it anyway. A few people will return boots that are 20 years old and worn down, and they'll take them, but most people won't ever use the policy, but just buy another pair after time. Doesn't hurt their bottom line to be on the customers' side, and probably helps them more than anything. Tell me how you feel walking out of a place like that rather than somewhere where you obviously bought a defective item, but it was 31 days ago, or lost the receipt, or you can't 100% prove it was broken right away, or whatever. You recommend the first place to everyone looking for that item, and you tell everyone that the 2nd place sucks, you hate them.
I'd argue that's basically semantics. The bottom line is, it's a price increase to keep what you have now. The postive side of it is, if you don't see value in streaming or in the DVD plan, you can drop one or the other without having to drop both. Right now you can't separate them. EDIT TO ADD: I stand corrected, you can currently have a standalone streaming only plan. Again, using me as an example, if I decided to drop streaming but keep 4 DVDs at a time, I could actually SAVE $6 a month after this is all said and done. Right now I don't have that option. I think one's individual anguish over this really boils down to how much they value the streaming option, ESPECIALLY in light of a possibly reduced instant streaming library.
I think people are blowing this waaaay out of proportion. Streaming started out as free because there wasn't a market for it yet. Nobody knew what it was and very few ppl had the ability to use it. Now, millions and millions use it, and millions more have the ability to use it. Major change. also, most people I know, use streaming exclusively, so the DVD's are extraneous to them. The streaming service has a life of it's own now, it should be separate. Despite the fact that the studios aren't big fans of the streaming concept, if Netflix has the resources to buy the big titles and even more content, they'll sell it to them. I think this is a debatable decision, but it's getting blown way out of proportion.
Yeah, it's also worth pointing out that Netflix had a user cap built into the streaming licensing because they had no idea it would take off so quickly. Now they have no choice but to renegotiate the licensing and they fully expect the studios to demand extortionate fees, since they can see just how much people like streaming.
It's an extra six bucks-a-month plus tax for me. Bringing it to a touch over $19.00 a month. The cable company charges me seventy-five bucks a month for the no frills package where there is NEVER anything on worth watching. I think Netflix has a long way to go where it's as poor a value as basic cable.
Streaming library is too limited. I'm going to use this one month to watch everything streaming I want to see then switch away to a 2 DVDs at a time plan and go back to how I used to do it. Frankly between video games and books, I can always find other entertainment during those 2 days it takes to get DVDs in the mail.
We're only on the 1-disc out a time plan, and sometimes we sit on the discs for weeks at a time, but the streaming gets used almost daily. We'll definitely be dumping the physical disc and using Redbox (or go back to buying used discs for cheap). Still odd that they can't offer a combo package any cheaper than that.
The TV series I get always have between 3 and 6 episodes per disk, making TV a better bargain than movies on DVD. My problem is the opposite - I don't always want to watch several episodes back to back, and hang onto a TV DVD longer just to pace my viewing. Yeah, if they wanted to handle it more deftly, they should have led up to the price change with a concerted campaign to place the blame on greedy Hollywood studios. Why doesn't the Netflix page itself have a "message from Netflix" field where they can pitch the company line to customers? They should have been doing that for years, building up trust, and then they could turn this into "us vs evil soulless Hollywood bastards." Everyone hates Hollywood anyway, and it does sound like that's where the problem lies. But deleting FB posts is just ham-handed bullshit. They're making themselves look like some kind of police state. This is a huge marketing/PR fuck-up. I would have expected a grown-up company to be a bit more clever and strategic. The hold-up in expanding streaming is that cable and studios see streaming, not DVDs, as a threat to their businesses and I'm sure they'll continue to put up barriers to streaming. Since streaming will never replicate the deep library that they've assembled on DVD, I'm giving up on the very notion of it. Studios and cable will never have an incentive to play ball. As for quicker new releases for DVDs, I'm pretty sure that needs to be tied to DVD releases for sales (to avoid cannibalization) but that's not an issue for me. I perpetually have 250+ DVDs in my queue, and I'm only dimly aware of what movie or TV show is releasing when. But if there's a big jump over to streaming and people are no longer sitting on DVDs for months, that might solve the problem of absurdly long wait-list times.