Quality of discs is going downhill (and they won't admit it)

[Mario Smith]

Over the past couple years, I've noticed more and more problems with the playback of DVDs and blurays.  It seems at least 1/2 the movies we get anymore will screw up somewhere in the middle and we'll miss part of a chapter or more to freezing up.  The discs themselves often show little or no wear which tells me it's a quality control issue from the manufacturer side.  

Lately, we've been getting more and more discs that won't play at all.  They won't even load in our bluray player.  The last example was Interstellar.  It wouldn't play so we asked for a new copy to be sent right away.  That one showed up and wouldn't play either.  I called the 800# to tell them about the problem and about how more and more of their discs have been faulty and they claimed it was the firmware on my DVD player, not their discs.  I spent the next hour figuring out how to upgrade the firmware on my player and the movies STILL didn't work.  I called to tell them they had a QC problem but they still claimed it was my player's problem.  My wife and I got fed up and finally paid $5.95 to watch it in-demand through our cable service.  The 3rd disc showed up several days later and, lo-and-behold, it worked just fine.  I wanted to call Netflix and tell them they were wrong, but I didn't want to put myself through that mess again.  I feel like they should have paid that $5.95.

Oh, by the way, the movie we have right now--Wild--won't play at all.  It looks brand new.  Screw Netflix and their crappy discs.