When they raised their prices the last time, I naturally grumbled about it. I mean, who wants to ever get charged more money for something? Even if you really like it, you’d rather pay as little as possible.
But I got over it, because I really did like Netflix. I reminded myself I get a lot out of the monthly fee I pay them, and I got over the price hike.
I don’t think I’m going to get over their latest news though. There will now be Netflix (streaming only) and Qwikster (DVD by mail).
Two separate services that you pay for separately and that have absolutely no integration at all. So if I keep both and want to rate a movie, I have to do it on both. If I need to change billing info, I have to do it on both. If I want to watch a movie and it’s not available for streaming, I have to go to a completely different site to add it to a completely different queue.
Theories abound about why they “had” to make this change. I guess some of them are plausible. But what doesn’t make sense to me is how any of the purported benefits outweigh the drop in customer satisfaction I (and millions of others) are bound to feel when all this goes live.
I think they should probably keep in mind that streaming movies is only the future of their business if they don’t drive away all their customers first.
