Saturday, January 28, 2012

Netflix and the definition of "fail"

So anyhow, as some of you know, I switched to Blockbuster By Mail when Netflix started messing with their pricing structure. Blockbuster's okay, but the disks take a lot longer to arrive than with Netflix, and they don't have some of the more obscure foreign films. So I decided I was going to go back to Netflix's Disk by Mail service. Except....

Except they don't offer it anymore!

Yep. The service that basically defined Netflix... no longer available to new customers. Instead, you have to buy their Streaming service for $8/month, then add on the 1 disk plus Blu-Ray service for an additional $10/month. $18/month for disk-by-mail, vs. $10/month for Blockbuster.

Way to go on your slide to irrelevancy, Netflix! Netflix is showing all the signs of a company in a death spiral, complete with massive flailing about where they can't stick with one business model for more than a few months. I think I'd rather sign up for a Hulu+ subscription at this point and stick with the Blockbuster for the movies, thank you very much -- I have enough drama in my own life, I don't feel like dealing with Netflix's too.

-- Badtux the Head-shakin' Penguin

6 comments:

  1. I have a combo pack. I pay too much, mostly because the old man is too stupid to stick stuff in the DVD queue and wait three days for it, and he ends up spending another 5-10 bucks a month on RedBox. I also notice that searching out two of my favorite actresses allowed me to watch exactly ZERO of their movies right now without waiting for the dvd.

    If you like documentaries however, Netflix is excellent, and there are quite a few foreign movies to stream. I don't know if I would have discovered just how consistently great (In Spanish, although his skills in English are definitely improving) Gael Bernal Garcia is, or how much I like some of the Argentinian movies out there. In fact, some of the best movies I have watched have been foreign, and some of my favorite tv shows were BBC.

    The best thing about Netflix?

    I can watch tv shows back to back and no ads.

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  2. I'm only streaming with them so that's fine. I hear what you're saying about bad decisions. If the 8smack streaming charge ever increases much that will be it for that. I watch every night one or two different things. It's my cheap entertainment for the month.. I see a commercial these days I can hardly swallow it. I completely shut down when I'm around them.

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  3. I recently got the Netflix streaming service and find that their selection of recent movies kind of sucks.

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  4. My sister uses the streaming service and has been watching the old PBS COSMOS series.

    Jerry's right about recent movies.

    Cheers!
    JzB

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  5. I like the streaming service because it has no ads. hulu drives me crazy with the ads. I go to Redbox for new mainstream stuff and I get my more obscure things from Greencine.

    Netflix was very stupid to have handled things the way that they did. I can think of all kinds of ways they could have achieved their goal of encouraging more streaming and less dvd use without angering their customers. The most obvious being to just do nothing since that is pretty much where we're all heading.

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  6. I would have no problem just sticking with the streaming if they offered me enough content with the streaming only option. And I can’t justify that much of a price increase for the same service if I have two subscriptions. So the whole Netflix debacle made me open my eyes and look elsewhere, that’s where I found the Blockbuster @ Home deal from DISH, I love this service. I have a ton of streaming available to me at my fingertips as well as a huge library of discs available via mail, those discs include video games as well which is a huge bonus. A great bonus about this, which I heard from my supervisor at work at DISH, is that it’s all covered under one subscription.

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