End of the Affair?

[dreamshark]

Okay, my infatuation with Netflix is officially over. Now we enter the long slog between the honeymoon and the breakup. If someone better walked in the door, I'd be out of this relationship in a heartbeat. Yet, astoundingly, there's nobody. But I'm keeping my eyes open now, y'better believe it.

Comments

[nellorat.livejournal.com]

Do tell! I'm still all glittery about their streaming to our TiVo. I never was that fond of the mail service, and we keep it only because I occasionally need for research some stuff they don't stream. But Netflix vs. Movies on Demand is saving us a fair amount of money AND it's stuff I like a lot better AND I can stop watching a bad film without feeling I'm wasting money.

[dreamshark.livejournal.com]

I discovered Netflix long before they had the streaming service, and recognized it for the incredible deal that it was. At that time my family was watching 2-4 disks/week, and Netflix was far cheaper than renting from the video store. I don't remember for sure, but even at the 3-disk level I think we were paying about $12/month.

Then along came Netflix streaming, and it was FREE with the DVD service we already had. I upgraded my DSL service explicitly so I could use streaming, and fell in love with it.

Netflix streaming is the greatest thing since sliced bread if you just feel like watching something but don't have anything in particular in mind. But if you have a specific movie or show that you want to watch (as I frequently do) the chances of finding it on Streaming are slim. So both parts of the Netflix service are equally important to me. The first time the price went up we dropped back to 2 disks at a time. After the next (massive) increase, we dropped to 1. This isn't a lot more than we used to pay for 3 disks, but considerably less convenient with 3 people choosing titles. Still, the price isn't really unreasonable for what you get.

But all the jerking around that they have been inflicting on their loyal customer base has taken its toll on my love and trust. For the last couple of years they have been making noises about moving their entire business model from the DVD to the streaming side. They kept changing the pricing models around, clearly trying to push customers out of DVDs and into streaming. Since they still have only a small fraction of their library available on streaming, I can't imagine what they think they are doing.

Now they've announced that they are splitting off the DVD business from Netflix into something called "Quikster." For now, the pricing is not changing, but customers will now have to create two accounts and log onto 2 different sites to do what they can do on one site now. The smarmy attempts to present this new annoyance as somehow being an improvement is just the last straw. I'm staying with them because there simply isn't another DVD-by- mail service that can touch them, but the love is gone.

[carbonel]

I, on the other hand, have had a long and reasonably happy relationship with Netflix as my bit on the side, and feel as if it just came to me and explained that it needed an extra $500 per month, and oh, yes, it wasn't going to able to spend as much time with me as before, either.

To leave analogy-land, I've essentially been hit with an $8/month increase for something I almost never use. I currently have a four-DVDs-at-a-time subscription, which was $22/month with unlimited streaming. Now Netflix wants $30/month for the same thing. I can drop the streaming entirely and go back to that $22. Or I can drop from four at a time to three at a time, and keep the streaming. That's $24/month, and is probably what I'll do.

I've been thinking of buying a Roku or something that will let me watch the downloaded movies on my TV. But out of 80-some items on my current queue, only 7 of them are available for instant download. Which means that if I have to choose which I want, I stay with the DVDs for now.

Between Netflix and DirecTV, I'm paying around $100/month -- without even getting any premium channels. I think it's time to make some kind of major cut.