To Mr. Reed Hastings:
I can understand your position. Netflix looses money on every disc mail out to its subscribers, the cost of acquiring media for the streaming service is expensive, and there are growing doubts over solvency of the United States Postal Service.
But a streaming only Netflix service as it now stands is full of B level content, that is unstable. A movie you may want to watch at some point may not be available when you finally have a chance to watch it. One of the excuses for the price increase was to allow Netflix to pay more for its content and hopefully lengthen the contracts, but with many other services competing for exclusivity of content Netflix will never have everything you may want to watch. The dvd/blu-ray que was the answer. The depth of the library insured that if it wasn’t streaming it was only a couple of days away. And if you put it in your dvd queue, it would automatically appear on the streaming queue if it happened to become available. That has been a huge bonus for a cinephile such as myself.
Dividing the service now means I have to have separate queues on two websites. For a Netflix subscriber from 2001 that is extremely annoying. You have basically doubled the bullshit I have to sort through in order to strategically plan my movie enjoyment. This move seems more like added bureaucracy than convenience.
If we look at the future of Netflix just as a streaming service a subscriber loses access to a host of films that are amazing but will never have enough viewers to justify streaming. This also opens the door for Amazon, Block Buster, Hulu, and a host of others compete directly with your streaming service without having to worry about the depths of the mail library.
If you look just at Quickster.com as a business. Which is merging the services of Gamefly.com and the original Netflix model. Offering disc based media by mail. The flaw with games is that already we are seeing the growth of download ability of affordably priced games across all three major consuls. With the video game industry trying it’s damnedest to destroy the rental market, the growth and price structure of downloadable video games will only continue to increase getting cheaper and more available.
As far as the movie side goes, how can it not become a niche market for Cinephiles and Technophobes that will more than likely shrink as time goes on.
For me and many other loyal Netflix subscribers the value was in the cheap and fast access to pretty much any film or TV show. The instant access was deep enough to find something interesting on a whim and the library was there if a film wasn’t available streaming. And now that this hard pivot of the company has alienated so many us, only time will tell which company I will go with for my streaming content.
