Best summation ever

[trinityvixen]

I have to say that as annoying as Netflix's recent moves have been, the smugness of the "Well, I only use streaming anyway, so ther" folks is worse. This post at Balloon Juice is typical of the breed. It's a hipster-esque poseur posture of cooler-than-thou because he gets this streaming that you pathetic people with your digital versitile discs are helpless to understand. It's fucking annoying and has nothing to do with the cogent point that I and others have made that Netflix's business plan is to screw themselves (and their customers) in some extremely uncomfortable place. It has nothing to do with being a luddite. I have streaming access on four different types of devices--mobile phone, video game system, tablet, and home computer--I think I can handle the streaming. The point is that I want the flexibility of still getting DVDs for times when, say, I'm upstate with no internet connection and shit cell phone reception which precludes my using Netflix's streaming service.

Or, to put it the way a commenter on that post did:
"The streaming catalog is a tiny fraction of their total DVD library, so streaming-only (while convenient) means instead of finding the specific movie you wanted to watch and watching it, you end up searching for something to watch. Instead of having the “whatever I want, when I want it” experience, Netflix streaming-only option re-creates the 1980’s video store experience of wandering through genre sections, looking for something that seems worth watching. That’s exactly the opposite of why I signed up for Netflix originally."

Oh my fucking God YES. THAT IS EXACTLY IT. I have a streaming queue that's easily longer than my DVD queue, and yet, when I go to it to see what I want to watch, I spend longer deciding what I want to watch--from a selection of things I must have thought I wanted to watch at some point!--than I do watching whatever it is I end up picking.

Comments

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

It's dead-on about the whole Netflix move--anything that makes watching a movie more difficult for your customers is bound to remind them of the bad old days, the exact thing that drove people to Netflix in the first place...

[droidguy1119.livejournal.com]

I'm one of those people who only uses streaming, because it helps me not buy DVDs that have no extras or films that will be coming to Blu eventually and I will want to own. I'm hoping that this stuff about "individual marketing budgets" will mean more films available on streaming.

My feeling is that Netflix genuinely believes in this change...to provide some sort of definitive indication of their next step. I read somewhere that Netflix spends a pretty penny in postage (enough so that the article was positing that Netflix ceasing to ship discs could be a fatal blow to the US Postal Service), so I think they're really banking on this either a) turning the DVD-by-mail stuff into a real money-loser so they can kill it without shame or b) that it will ultimately revitalize that part of their business.