I’ve been following the changes to Netflix service with an eagle eye, from their price increase to their change in providers (no Starz? What?), so when they announced earlier today that more changes were on the way, I wanted to share them with you.
Netflix has decided to focus on streaming video and separate their DVD-by-mail service into a separate company, called “Qwikster” (an odd name for the slower of their two services) which will now include video game rental. Similar to GameFly, a service we recommended in our tech gift guide that allows you to rent video games by mail, Qwikster will allow you to rent DVDs plus games for the big 3: XBOX 360, Wii, and Playstation.
While game access through Quikster won’t be as exhaustive as a GameFly subscription, it will be pretty convenient if you’re already a Netflix member to add video games to your queue.
Netflix streaming video services, however, will still be available under the Netflix name.
Of course, the success of this split all depends on the price of the Qwikster service costs, which has yet to be announced. This might have been a smart way to win back members who were thinking about ditching the DVD service, but it still doesn’t solve the issue of Netflix’s lackluster streaming options.
Unless you’re a fan of movies from 1998. -Kristen
So what do you think? Will you stick with Netflix?
[photo via]
First off I think the new name for the DVD portion is stupid, but they didn’t ask me. I’m wondering what customers they did ask about any of this, ’cause the comments I saw on page one of the blog post didn’t sound particularly positive. It didn’t seem as if there had been enough research and analysis into what all these changes would mean to the company/customers.
I wonder what backtracking and scrambling might be going on to incorporate changes people will demand. A lot of the people that were keeping both services were not happy that there would be two ques, so we’ll see how that will pan out in the end. If, as some mentioned, it is fairly well integrated like the GAP brands, then perhaps it will be okay.
At any rate, we’ve been planning on canceling our DVD portion, but just hadn’t done it yet (shared password that neither of us can quite remember + inertia…) We’re not hip, with it, and up on the very latest, so the oldness of many streaming options hasn’t been much of an issue yet. We’ll see.
I don’t know if we’ll stick with it or not… we actually tend to be lazy when it comes to the mail service and the boys don’t care if they watch the same streaming cartoons 20 times. So we may end up ditching the mail service all together… unless the game rentals make it worth it. We’ll see!
I canceled my Netflix once the price increase took effect. Just DVD is soooo not worth the cost since we only watch one or 2 a months and the instant streaming isn’t worth it since it is always retrieving (We live in a community that shares an internet provider). It is a pain and separating the services or paying a higher price made me say “Bye Bye Netflix.”
Personally I really see no reason to change the name. It is one company just a different option.
We dumped them for good. It’s not the pricing, but their UX is terrible, and makes it impossible to find good content that isn’t popular. Plus, their reaction (none) to the literal swarm of more than five thousand comments on their blog about the UX changes was just pathetic. They don’t deserve my business.
We gave up on Netflix too. We can get dvds at a local Redbox very easily, spending only $1 per movie. We watch one movie a week, so it just wasn’t worth it to keep the dvd portion and the streamed content was not up to snuff. I realized they have to pay a lot for rights and such, but in this economy, they should have realized that this economy couldn’t handle that kind of price increase.