Leave Netflix Alone!
So it seems that Netflix has saddled its users with another distribution change and price drop/hike, by splitting its streaming and DVD-distribution services apart and charging separately for them. The last price change, set back in November 2010, had an $8 streaming-only plan, and a $10 streaming-plus-1-DVD plan, which is the one we have been on. Now, the plan – which takes effect immediately for new customers and in September for existing customers – is still $8 for streaming-only, but they’ve jacked up DVD-distribution to $8/mo by itself. They attribute this to the steeply rising cost of licensing fees from distributors, which is understandable, since the movie industry has been suffering SO MUCH. Film profits have ONLY doubled sine 1995. It’s hard to understand how they could survive on that.
So poor Netflix has to pass their beleaguered system costs onto the masses, and they’re suffering in the blogosphere for it. Trolls, some though long dead, have crept out of the rotten woodwork and have screamed to any god that will listen about the Lust-from-Se7en assault that we suffer from this change in pricing. Truly, there has never been a more horrific affront to humankind since the Black Plague.
Oh please.
Look at it this way, folks– how much are you paying for, let’s say, HBO on a monthly basis? We picked it up for Game of Thrones, something I probably won’t be doing next year.1 Sure, they’ve got a few channels, and some more recent movies – though, in my view, not enough to make it worth the $14.99/month. Oh yes, and they now have streaming! HBOGO debuted in April, and it’s been utterly failing since. The last two times I tried watching a movie through it, it froze up ten minutes into the film – and not because of my cable modem, I assure you. Add that to the three possible other cable movie sites – Showtime, Cinemax and Starz – and you’re shelling out a hefty sum for a few decent movies. Perhaps it’s not as obvious because the cost is lumped in with the rest of the cable bill, rather than standing on its own. Just HBO and Showtime together is $30/month, a pretty penny with not much payoff.
So if Netflix’s streaming+1 DVD comes now to $16/month, what of it? You’re still getting access to their DVD library, which gets new movies before the cable stations do, and plenty of content in streaming, especially for folks like me that are woefully behind in their movie and show watching, like many families out there that have a lot less time with their TVs than they did when they were single and/or childless. Heck, I’m still trying to catch up on Farscape, if that tells you anything.
I think Netflix’s big mistake was making the pricing announcement in the middle of summer, which is the height of trolling season. Nothing brings out the worst in people like a hot sun. Next time, try late August, when people are too busy with getting back to school.
- because of the service, not the show [↩]
The sound of so many teeth gnashing yesterday was nigh-deafening, wasn’t it? Netflix went from being a golden child to gutter trash in the time it took the first subscriber to realize they’d be paying a few bucks a month more come September.
Let’s face it, though: the DVD + streaming crowd has had it pretty damn good thus far. Movies in the mail plus all you can eat over the Internet (granted, from a significantly smaller catalog) for less than the cost of a premium movie channel on cable (and, as you point out, James, access to movies much quicker than on those premium movie channels). That’s a pretty nice deal.
Though this price hike affects DVD customers (such as myself, at least for the time being), I see it as Netflix moving away from the DVD-delivery market and focusing more on their streaming service. Essentially, they’re trying to defray some of the rising streaming license costs by charging more for for DVD delivery. And if everyone drops DVD delivery? Well, that might be exactly what Netflix wants: no more DVDs to buy, no more shipping costs.
My wife and I looked at how we use the Netflix DVD service and decided that we’ll drop it (but keep streaming) come September. We’ve had discs sit around, unwatched, for months at a time before someone remembers to send them back (on at least one occasion without watching the movie). There was a time (when I was racing through the first seasons of Burn Notice, for example) when I was very diligent about watching and returning DVDs, often turning around three DVDs a week, but the reality is that we’re not really getting our money’s worth from the DVD service now (we have the 2-DVD-at-a-time plan, with separate queues for my wife and I), so we’ll actually be saving money when we downgrade.
No tooth-gnashing here, no outrage, no fuming threats of cancelling the service altogether: just an examination of how we use Netflix and the realization that streaming provides us with a much better value.
What troubles me most about it is that they rather casually announced a 60% rate hike on the most commonly subscribed plan and tried to sell it as a boon for their customers. Is it still a terrific entertainment value? Absolutely, and I think that if they’d gone about it differently, they’d have taken much less flak.
For me, though, I’ve been thinking of signing up for a while, and the streaming-only option is the one most appealing to me, so I’d actually be saving $2/mo.
Woot.
We use the DVDs quite a lot, especially since newer movies are never available on DVD. We don’t buy Blu-Rays since we get them from Netflix weekly. And since we haven’t had cable for about 4 years now, Netflix and Hulu make a great substitute. We’re going through season 1 of The Big Bang Theory on discs from Netflix this month.
For the record, you’re welcome to borrow our Farscape DVDs at any time.
Oh no! Netflix is going to go out of business soon, according to Fox!
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/07/26/wal-mart-takes-on-netflix-offers-video-streaming/
[...] DVDs that are delivered right to my door to be pissed off about being asked to pay a separate, entirely reasonable price for the [...]