ignawal nordic inignatya
Ashely Wolfgram
The service is being offered at no additional charge to customers who subscribe to both services. This morning subscribers can browse through an expanding library of more than 12,000 movies and TV episodes at www.netflix.com, add them to their Netflix instant Queue, and then watch them on TV with just a click of the TiVo remote. The library includes titles from every genre, with a modest selection of HD content available as well. Both standard and HD titles are expected to grow in the weeks and months ahead.
Over the weekend, without telling users, Netflix decided to stop displaying all titles from users instant watch queue if the rights to stream the content has expired. In the past, these titles remained in the queue and if they were to expire soon, they would also list the date when they would no longer be available for streaming. While Netflix took to their blog on Saturday saying they made this change to, "make the instant Queue easier to manage", clearly all they are trying to do is hide the fact that so many titles are expiring.
Even though Netflix says they didn't actually remove any of the titles from the queue and that they will reappear once again if they get the rights to stream the title, the fact is users can no longer see them, or manage them. And since most of us probably don't remember what all those titles were, how are we suppose to add them to our DVD queue since they are no longer available for streaming? Not to mention, the titles that we can longer see in our queue, count towards the limit of 500 titles you can have in your queue at any one time. So if we can't see them, how are we suppose to delete them so that we can add more titles to our queue?
What Netflix has done is take the problem of too many streaming movies becoming unavailable and turned it into two problems; we can't keep track of them to add them to the DVD queue and hidden movies count toward our queue count but we can't see them to delete them. How dumb. Not to mention, Netflix says while it "looks like some titles are gone", they didn't "remove" them. Really? So we can no longer see them and we have no way to manage them yet Netflix says it only "looks like" the titles are gone? The titles are gone if w can't see them! I am getting so tired of Netflix's blog posts lately which are starting to sound like they are written by a bunch of lawyers being creative with words.
Netflix can try and spin this any way they want but the bottom line is that the Starz contract is due to expire in about five months and at that time, a lot of users would have a bunch of titles showing up in their saved queue and would starting realizing just how many movies are becoming unavailable for streaming. And some Netflix users would reconsider keeping their account active or not. This is simply Netflix's way of trying to make sure we don't notice what's expiring, by not letting us see all the movies in our queue. Brilliant job Netflix. You just made your service harder to use and you announced the change only after people noticed it and started complaining. You may be in the driver's seat now, but I can't wait till Amazon eats your lunch.
The difference is that Apple angers me professionally, where Netflix ticks me off personally. While I hold Apple's feet to the fire where it's warranted, I seethe whenever the word "Netflix" is uttered.
Hastings is Netflix CEO, and yesterday, he opened his mouth and inserted his foot. Netflix is now available to Canadians in an online-only version. The service costs $7.99 per month. The lowest Americans pay is $8.99 per month. You can start to see where this is going.
That last one has gotten much better in recent months, but the others are actually reasonable complaints if you sift through the bile. The biggest two are the poor quality of Blu-rays (we actually dropped that service because it was so bad) and the fact that programs that are available on Watch Instantly go away after a while.
I assume the reason that Watch Instantly programs go away has to do with the same movie industry idiocy that pervades everything. This practice does, in fact, make me crazy, but there's really probably nothing Netflix can do about it. Crazy movie industry policies will have to stop if online distribution is to be a long-term viable media without constant consumer aggravation.
In fact Americans are so not self-absorbed that when they found out Hastings mentioned that we're somewhat self-absorbed (not even completely self-absorbed, just "somewhat"), certain totally-not-even-self-absorbed people went ballistic.
No, the guy who said he'd accept Hastings apology only if Netflix offered Watch Now for Linux wasn't self-absorbed. The guy who called Hastings an a-hole because the friends feature isn't there anymore isn't self-absorbed. The fifteen people who claimed they canceled their movie subscriptions (thereby freeing up much more of their time to lurk on comment boards) aren't self-absorbed. The guy who claimed he searched out Netflix customer support to vent his anger about the comment wasn't self-absorbed. The guy who called Hastings arrogant wasn't self-absorbed.
And the guy who wished Netflix would go out of business and stop providing a service to 15 million people and hoped all the company's 2000+ employees would lose their jobs because the CEO stuck his foot in his mouth, that guy, too, isn't self-absorbed. Nope. Not at all. Just because his feelings were hurt (or, more likely, he just wanted an excuse for a rant), this troll wanted to see the destruction of the entire Netflix ecosystem. That's most certainly not self-absorbed!
In fact, virtually all of the commenters were so not self-absorbed that they didn't notice why there was a price difference. Americans pay $8.99 per month because we get a DVD by mail. Canadians don't get the DVD. They get less and so they pay less.
Let me be clear. I love America and I love that we're self-absorbed. We wouldn't be nearly as great a nation if we weren't so incredibly selfish. Enlightened self-interest drives innovation, progress, and success, and self-absorbedness is at the heart of enlightened self-interest.
But I think Hastings deserves a break and we all need to lighten up. The idea that we all have to be perfect is a fallacy. We all make mistakes. Honestly, Hastings was speaking the truth. Americans (or at least many of us) are self-absorbed. His comment boards proved that. But we need to cut each other some slack, and chill out -- both on the Netflix comment boards and in real life. We all need to take a chill pill.
P.S. My incredibly patient and tolerant wife, after enduring years of my various semi-irrational rants about Netflix, was genuinely amused to see I was working on a somewhat positive piece about Netflix. She wanted to be sure I recognized the irony. I do, Honey, I honestly, honestly do!
Update: A couple of people asked why the second account without Watch Instantly was a problem. Yes, we could watch my wife's Watch Instantly queue on our TiVo (when the Watch Instantly worked). But on my Netflix Queue, there was no indication of whether a movie was Play Instantly or not. So that meant I often wound up waiting to get disks for movies that I could have watched instantly, had the Netflix queue on the second account reflected it.
Shameless complaining aside, I think that the fact that secondary accounts don't have a Watch Instantly option (even though we're paying for it), don't reflect any Watch Instantly information in any searches or in the Web interface, and effectively require you to give other family members your password if you want to let them use Watch Instantly is a failure on Netflix' part.
Only two of your four criticisms are at all accurate, at least with Netflix on my TiVo HD box. The streamed films are usually original format with no detectable compression. And, the time from putting them in an instant view queue to starting them is, well, INSTANT.
I can see that selection getting better, and it certainly does supplement the three-at-a-time selection of DVDs that are first-run, genuinely good programming. I grew to loathe the Blockbuster experience of walking through the store for what seemed like hours, my head cocked to the right to read the oh-too-familiar titles.
I have Cox Internet, an HP Pavilion laptop with a Pentium 4 cpu 2.00 GHz, 1 GB of ram, and a Mobility M6 display adapter. Also the latest version of Silverlight. I close down all other programs and kill off some background processes when I watch instantly.
Netflix is now available in 41 countries and its subscriber base grew by approximately one-third from third quarter 2012 to third quarter 2013. It has demonstrated creative chops with House of Cards (first Emmy for an online-only TV show) and Orange is the New Black (highly acclaimed).
Netflix clearly prefers its customers watch streaming movies rather than deal with inventory, handling and shipping. The only option on a title description page is add the title to the watch instantly list, although a search entry contains both options.
The Netflix interface for DVDs and Watch Instantly shows that it is easy to bump a title to the number one position but implies that any other re-ordering requires manual re-numbering.
However, active alerts about the availability of a queued DVD as watch-on-demand title could save Netflix money on handling and shipping and increase the use of the service. When customers use a service more often, they value it (if the service meets or exceeds expectations).
I have a long-standing frustration with the Netflix web interface: when I see that a movie or television show in my DVD queue is available to watch instantly, adding that title to the Watch Instantly list is a pain.
When I mouseover the title in the DVD Queue, Netflix pops up a description. But there is no option for moving this movie to the Watch Instantly queue. The popup provides no options, not even to remove from the queue.
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