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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.
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
It's not an issue of being lazy. Blockbuster is notorious for either not carrying titles or carrying shitty, edited versions of the titles they DO carry. See Requiem for a Dream as an example. It's only been recently that Blockbuster has started doing away with non-widescreen DVDs, too.
Its big-chain competitors aren't really much better, selection-wise, and the non-chain local stores I've lived near have always had pretty bad return windows compared to the bigger guys.
Little non-chains == more eclectic selection, small return windows (in my experience, that is . . . your mileage may vary)
Blockbuster and similar chains == Better return windows, crappier selection
Netflix == Good selection, kickass return window
Once you add "it comes right to your door", it's absolutely no wonder that NF has taken off.
Mikey-San
Karma: +Eleventy billion (mostly affected by watching Celebrity Jeopardy)
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 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 recently went for 7 months with no car at all. We're a family of 3, including (at the time) a toddler of just over a year, and we walked everywhere - to get groceries, to get movies, to work, to the bus stop, to the bank, etc. Carrying a 20+ lb baby.
I joined Netflix when Blockbuster charged me $14.95 for returning ONE movie 15 minutes late. The sales slip said "due back on Friday, 12 pm" and I mistakenly thought that was midnight...it was noon. (Off topic - why the heck doesn't 12 pm come after 11 pm?)
At the time I was working a 4 pm to 2 am shift, and most days I was not even AWAKE by noon.
I realized that not only was Blockbuster's schedule completely incompatible with mine, but they were assholes too. They refused to remove the late fees - they had charged me for another 5 days for being 15 minutes late - why not ONE day late? There was a class action lawsuit against them a few years back for this.
Nevermind that I can't get the movies I want through Blockbuster anyhow - when's the last time you saw Cannibal the Musical on their shelves?
As a republican I feel it my responsibity to manufacture criminals. People need punished!
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.
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.
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