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Netflix Throttling Heavy Renters
dankinit writes "Netflix has begun using a 'fairness algorithm' that slows shipments of movies to heavy users to protect profits, according to an MSNBC article. Netflix revised its terms of use in January 2005 to read, 'In determining priority for shipping and inventory allocation, we give priority to those members who receive the fewest DVDs through our service'. Since revising this policy last year, more and more users are realizing 'heavy renters are more likely to encounter shipping delays and less likely to immediately be sent their top choices' according to the article."
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It's like the British ADSL industry... you sell something you know to be unsustainable, then add fair usage policies.
Seriously, can someone explain the popularity of Netflix to me?
I like getting out of my house, going for a walk (the few miles each way won't kill anybody) and actually interacting with normal people, picking a few movies to watch off the shelves, paying a few bucks and walking back to my home. If I'm feeling lazy, I might even drive.
I never thought services like Netflix would take off, but I guess people have proven to be lazier than I gave them credit for.
They don't end up looking like buttholes if they are just honest about it up front.
you're 100% right. What is wrong, however, is that our way of doing business rewards businesses who are as hidden and dishonest about their business practices as possible. Really, it comes down to pleasing shareholders vs. customers...
good businesspeople understand that pleasing shareholders and customers is, at it's core, the same thing...anyone who makes a distinction is selling out
Thank you Dave Raggett
Once in a while break the DVDs and tell them it was "Postal Service" fault if Netflix lies to you that your DVD is delayed because of "Postal Service."
That oughta fuckup that fairness algorithm.
If it's the cost, just increase the subscription fee. If it's the piracy, just limit the DVD rental amount per month. But don't fucking lie to your customers like everyone is a cheap ass thief who's out to get everyone in Hollywood.
"Don't let fools fool you. They are the clever ones."
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I signed up like 2.5 months ago because I didn't feel like buying DVD sets of TV series as much. Put a bunch of Alias, Babylon 5, and World Poker Tour DVD seasons in my queue.
... ever. They seemed to pick 3 out of my top 15 almost at random. Instead of them shipping my new picks out the same day they got my returns, Netflix would aknowledge receipt and then say "Shipping tommorrow". And to top it off every return envelope I got was for a out-of-state center, Minnesota, New York, even Oregon (So that it would take longer to reach them).
I live in northeast ohio and the closest center is about an hour away in Cleveland, so I figured my responce time would be pretty good. And it was, at least for the first 1.5 months. I'd get 3 DVD's in the mail, I'd rip them to my HD for encoding and backup (to watch later), and send them out the next day. The day after I sent them Netflix would confirm that they had them and send out the next ones. Everything in my queue had the "Now" availablity and I always got my top 3. Every return envelope was also addressed to PO Box in Cleveland (their closest dist. center).
After about a month or so of this cycle there 'throttling' method kicked in. It affected the service in a number of interesting ways. First, even though everything in my queue had the best availability possible I now no longer got my top 3
This sent my monthly total from about 17-18 to 10-11. Now 10 rentals for 18 bucks is still cheap but what made me cancel was because of the unpredictablity of the resulting service. I never knew what I was getting, if my turnaround would be 2 days or 4.
I really have no problem with Netflix curtailing their heavy users (As I was) but they should be more upfront about it and just put a limit on monthly rentals then. If I could get their "normal" service for just the first 2.5 weeks of the month and then they would say "Your allocation is used up" that'd be worth it to me. At least then I would know when to expect the dvd's. $1.80 a rental (10 a month for $18) feels cheap enough for me for those DVD sets I'm to cheap to buy. But if I don't know which ones I'm getting or when I'm getting them it is so not worth it.
I guess "screwing over people who watch a lot of movies" is one of their "improvements" that they've made.
Actually, this is nothing new, despite the summary for this story leading with Netflix has begun using a 'fairness algorithm'. The article I link to dates back to April 2003 and such 'punishments' were apparent back then.
I am signed up with ScreenSelect, a British version of Netflix, and it can be quite obvious that they throttle heavy users. For instance, I'm on the most expensive three-disk plan for £15 a month and if I were to send all of the movies back on a Monday, I will only receive two disks back on Wednesday. Looking at the selection page of the website, it will describe the third film as 'awaiting allocation' and the trailing DVD will usually arrive on Thursday, using the above timeline as an example.
Having said that, I keep my account with ScreenSelect because I can still average 10-12 films a month and if you look at what I am paying it is good value when compared to walk-in rental like BlockBuster. Furthermore, the selection is huge, the website is excellent in all aspects and they are generally quite good in getting your high priority titles out to you first (although I hardly ever rent new releases so make of that what you will).
Mother, do you think they'll like this sig?
Isn't there an obvious answer?
1) Start a Netflix subscription. When throttling starts, cancel.
2) Start a Blockbuster subscription. When throttling starts, cancel.
3) Go back to step one, this time using another person's name in your household, with a different credit card. This will be indistinguishable from a new renter/owner of your house or apartment.
The above demonstrates one of the problems with a company being tricky with customers: Customers can be tricky too, and there are a lot more of them.
--
Before, Saddam got Iraq oil profits & paid part to kill Iraqis. Now a few Americans share Iraq oil profits, & U.S. taxpayers pay to kill Iraqis. Improvement?
Give me a break...am I supposed to believe that the Netflix customer that gets 12 movies per week is some wide-eyed babe struggling to understand this brave new world of technology?
Bullshit.
The people getting throttled aren't "ignorant to new, abusive polices"; they have been scrutinizing the Netflix TOS and dreading this day's arrival. They know they got a good ride. Now the ride is over. Deal with it.
Actually, my wife wife and I just had a baby (well, she did all the hard work). My wife was just asking me last night how to add a header to a word document. Not two breaths later she was saying she had gained a reputation at work for being the tech savvy person in the office. When I was done laughing, I told her how to do the header thing.
While you may wonder what this has to do with netflix, my wife watches dvds from netflix all the friggin time. She only works 12 hours a week. The baby sleeps a lot. We don't even have a DVD burner.
Recently, my wife has been complaining that the netflix rentals have been taking longer and longer to arrive. It seems that every three day holiday weekend for the last few months we've had to go to Blockbuster to rent a movie - simply because there wasn't a netflix movie in the house. I'm emailing the link to my wife, and I guarantee we'll be considering alternate vendors.
Your sig(k) has been stolen. There is a puff of smoke!
About a year later, I got an envelope from them in the mail. It had the Stones CD in it. My guess is the DVD I rented wasn't that popular, and had just then been sent to someone, who subsequently discovered my Stones CD and sent it back to Netflix. I thought it showed something they actually bothered to return it.
Most likely, someone at the post office was stealing the discs. The envelopes are very easy to identify and steal.
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
I've been a happy customer with Netflix for a year and a half or so. I recently canceled my account with them but thats because I can not get the postman to take my returning netflix movies. So I canceled rather than trying to deal with the guys supervisor, and have to worry about my incoming mail arriving. Anyway... my lifes problems aren't the point of this post.
During that year and a half, I noticed that my movies started coming slower. I figured they had an algorithm to keep the flow of DVD's at a rate that kept their profits at a certain point. This didn't seem like a big deal to me, all you can eat... isn't... unlimited bandwidth... isn't... so it would stand to reason unlimited rentals would follow the same pattern.
However if Netflix was using an algorithm, that would mean that by changing my behavior I could maximize my return. Now I didn't try to make a thesis, or even write down data, so take my results with a grain of salt.
I learned that how many movies you send is the most important variable. I had a three at a time account and then went to a five at a time account to see if that would get me faster results. What I found is that the recieving time didn't change. I recieved my "We got the DVD" email from Netflix no matter how many DVD's I sent back. This allowed me to factor out the post office.
I have a taste for indy movies, weird Japanese movies, and Samurai flicks, so I never had any notice for waiting times as my movies were not in as high demand. When I wanted more popular movies it was not irregular to have a notice saying there was a short or long wait. So I could factor out other user demand.
So I tryed various schemes from sending one movie a day to sending all five at once, but only once a week. Effectively this is almost the same thing. The first method was sending 6 movies a week the second was sending 5 movies a week. One movie a day kicked once a weeks butt. When I sent one a day, Netflix would send me a message the next day that it had recieved my movie, would ship it out that day, and I'd recieve it the day after. To be more clear, I put it in the mail on Monday, recieved emails on Tuesday, recieved DVD on Wensday. So one day there, one day back.
When I sent 5 movies I would recieve the email notices from Netflix the next day that they were recieved, but typically would not have any movies shipped for two to three days, and that would be one or two, the rest would trickle in after. To make that more clear, I if I put them in on Monday, I recieved email on Tuesday, a movie or two Friday, a movie or two Saturday, and typically what was left on Monday, but sometimes not till Tuesday. This means 10 movies equals something like two and a half to three weeks. Remember I was sending them all together to test response times, so I wouldn't finish watching the last movie until Tuesday or Wensday. Sending them every day 10 movies equals about a week and a half. So sending them all at once was twice as slow.
The delay from sending the mean average of 3 movies at once seemed to be on par with sending 5. What I mean by that is it tended to be two days delay rather than three days at 5. 2 movies seemed to incure a one day delay.
I don't claim to know their algorithm, but it seems like functionally it is near: delay time = (# of movies shipped) - 1
So my recommendation would be figure out how many movies you want on hand, and add two, and that would be the plan to get.
I'd love to hear if other people had the same or differing experiences.
I tried Netflix a couple of years ago and hated the service. Then I discovered my local library. They have a plethora of movies and for $1 a pop, its not bad. They don't even mind if you take your laptop over and watch the movie in the library for free.
See, this is what bothers me. They have several tiers of service already based on how many discs you can get at a time, and certain ones limit how many per month.
Why not either extend the limit to x per month on all the plans (annoying to heavy renters though) or just raise the price of the plan to where even if the person watched each movie they got the day they got it and turned it around, Netflix still makes a profit?
Or, even better, do both, but have the ones with monthly limits be cheaper (like now, but allow some more expensive plans with 15 movies a month rather than say 4).
I hate all these "hidden costs" now adays. Just put the real price up front, and charge what you have to to provide the service, don't put in hidden or vague delays, limits, caps whatever.
Opera, Proxomitron-Grypen,GPG 0x0A1C6EE3
Netflix has been admitting that #1 happens for a while (presumably since Jan 2005, I guess) but has been actively denying that #2 happens, at least until very recently. We've been discussing this sort of thing on the Netflix Operations discussion list for quite some time now, and this is the first time that I've heard Netflix admit that #2 happens.
There are other ways that throttling could be done -- Netflix could deny that they've received certain movies right away, and instead check them in tomorrow or the next day. They could also deliberately ship a movie to somebody from across the country rather than from their same city, even though the movie is available in the same city, which would delay the receipt of the movie by a few days. People have accused Netflix of deliberately doing both of these things on the list above, and they seem to happen more often than one would expect, but not often enough to really show that Netflix has been doing it intentionally. It may be that Netflix has experimented with these methods of throttling, or that it was just a few accidents that were blown out of porportion. I don't know.
But the throttling that Netflix is now admitting to -- we've known they've been doing this for a long time, and they've been denying at least part of the it for a long time.
Well, what is `false advertising' is not for Netflix to decide -- it's for a court of law. But the users of Netflix have definately been able to determine at least much of what Netflix has been doing, for a long time. I'm glad to see that Netflix is finally admitting it.Suppose you have a Netflix user who returns every movie he gets from Netflix the very next day -- he's a heavy user. Suppose this user lives in a city where Netflix also has a distribution center, so mail only takes one day back and forth. And suppose that Netflix wants to slow him down and reduce the number of movies he gets, because he's costing them money (being a heavy user.) One possible way to do this, one that's somewhat subtle if not done too often, is to send some of his movies from the center across the country, even though they're also available at the local center. That way, a movie will take 3-4 days to reach him rather than just one day. Each time a movie takes 4 days to reach him rather than one, that's one less movie he can rent that month.
You need to read more carefully, dude. I didn't say Netflix did this, only that they've been accused of it. (I personally think that if they have done it (and this is an if), they've not done it very often, at least not to me.)But whether they've done it or not -- it still makes sense. Netflix does occasionally send movies from across the country -- this is a well known fact, and one that they've always admitted. If you want some obscure movie and Netflix only has two copies of it, it makes perfect sense that they may have to send it from Kalamazoo rather than your local city. But to actually prove that they do this intentionally when they don't have to, that would be tricky -- it would require that 1) they do it often, or 2) you have lots of data from lots of people, both heavy and light users, to analyze, or 3) have access to Netflix's inventory information. And as far as I know, nobody has shown that Netflix has done this, at least not in any very convincing manner.
For the people that are ripping all these movies, lets assume a prolific 20 DVD's a month at an average rate of 3GB a movie, they are filling up a 300GB HD every 5 months, and a 300 GB HD is in the$130 range, it's cheaper to keep the service and re-queue if you want to watch it again, plus all the saved effort of not squandering time ripping in the first place.
I would love to see the netflix rippers get busted.I'm a pretty infrequent movie viewer. Sometimes it'll take me a full month to send a movie back to Netflix. I think they should give priority to people who watch movies all the time. I don't think I'd be terribly bothered if I had to wait an extra day for my next movie so that someone who cares more about it can get their next movie. I like the quick turnaround I currently get, but I'm sure other subscribers would appreciate it more than me.
-Rich