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Netflix Users Experience Paradox of Abundance
prostoalex writes "The deal seems to be rather simple — you pay a monthly fee, receive a certain number of DVDs, and as soon as you watch them, and send them back, there's more coming. This simple model made Netflix into a $1.4 bln company, but now, Wall Street Journal reports, some Netflix users are experiencing the abundance paradox — the movies arrive, collect dust on the customer's desks, and then are sent back for the new set of movies to face the same fortune. From the article: "'It's a paradox of abundance,' said Siva Vaidhyanathan, a professor of culture and communication at New York University. If people aren't pressured to see a movie in a specific time frame, he said, viewers tend to put it lower on their priority list. 'When you have every choice in front of you, you have less urgency about any particular choice.'"
I am grateful to Netflix for finally letting me turn my .txt file of "maybe checkout this movie someday" into an actual list that I'm actually plowing through. Unfortunately, the queue tends to grow over time... I try to counteract this by setting aside time on a semiregular schedule, but still...
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
Several friends of mine, as well as myself, have noticed that you can get movies rather quickly for the first two months or so, but after that the pace slows down. When the time between you shipping a movie out and getting more back starts at 2-3 days, but then gets extended to a full week, the difference is noteable.
The point is, this "paradox of abundance" only exists for the few people who don't use what they pay for, people who honestly want abundance get screwed over by design.
Sorry but if you think something is a negative effect, you should come right out and explain why instead of implying it.
In this case I think that it's a good thing(TM). Now that there's no percieved scarcity, people are free to watch what they want only when they actually want to. I've experienced this with music and movie downloading as well as netflix. Sometimes I go through periods of watching/listening to these and sometimes i go through periods of doing other things with my life.
Newsflash people are free to set their own priorities. Since when is making this easier a bad thing?
Liberty.
I don't really see what's so bad about this. It's there, and maybe you get around to watching it and maybe you don't.
One positive thing that I have noticed since I started Netflix is that I watch a lot less movies that I *don't* care about much. Back when I used to go to the video store, I might have a few movies in mind, and maybe these movies would be in, or not, or maybe I remember my mental list, or maybe not. But at that point, I've driven to the video store, so I'm leaving with at least one movie. So, I spend 45 minutes to finally decide on something that I don't even care about, just so my trip wasn't a total loss.
If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. -- Carl Sagan
OT but does anybody think this abundance is part of the stagnation in the movie world right now? Movies that seemed so important are just gone in days and weeks, lost in the sands of time and replaced by the next coming thing.
The longer you hold on to movies on average, the less they have to spend on round trip postage. You're paying them a monthly fee whether you go through 15 movies or just 1.
Remember going to your local video rental store and going up and down the aisles to peruse the movies. I enjoyed that.
So did I, but rental places now have about a total of thirty movies - or at least thirty really, really new movies and then shelves of drek.
I like Netflix because of all the access to things that would never, ever be at a video store. You just can't beat a selection of hundreds of thousands of titles.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Video-On-Demand is one of the best things I have ever seen come from the cable company. I never had digital cable or seen it (figured all it was was a little better quality and a way to encrypt the pay channels), until I went to my buddys place and helped him set up his home theatre. Video on demand kicks ass. Being able to watch Monk episodes a day after they are shown, having access to the HBO series on demand, all the free movies that are available, it's very nice. I hate movie theatres, so I have missed out on a lot of releases and in the past couple months hanging out with my friends I've caught up on so many movies by just hitting the VOD button and pressing play. The only time it sucks is when their server goes down or when the movie isnt coded right and it starts playing the wrong movie.
oh noes! my pr0ns
That's the point of the article. It's not about whether you're lazy or stupid or just not disciplined enough to watch rented movies. However, when you're given an abundant amount of choices, it's often harder to make a good decision. Add netflix's delay into the mix (what do I think I'd like to watch at some point in the future?) and it gets even harder.
Of course we want to see Hotel Rwanda, or the new almodovar film, because we are advanced, modern intellectuals. In reality, after a 12 hour day of re-factoring someone else's messy code, would you rather open a beer and collapse in front of Hotel Rwanda or Super Troopers?
The problem is netflix (and tivo) makes you confront this issue - You have to send it back and quit on it. You have to admit that you don't want to watch Hotel Rwanda. You'd rather fast forward to the "good parts" of The Girl Next Door rather than think about genocide. You are not the advanced, modern intellectual you thought you were. Who wants an existential crisis when they thought they were just renting movies? Is this horrible? probably. So is alcoholism, but i bet you didn't cringe when I opened a beer in the above paragraph.
This topic has brought out a lot of elitist viewpoints... I'm surprised. You may use Netflix perfectly. Congratulations. That's not what we were talking about. The intersting thing about this is how a fairly subtle shift in delivery method created a whole mess of problems (as well as solutions) for the end user, and ended up changing the experience for the user substantially.
Now, to really make it interesting, lets talk about the Netflix friends feature, where your friends can see what you rent and what's in your queue, as well as what you thought of it. Are you really willing to give Ultimate Fighting Championship 5 stars if that girl you've got your eye on is going to find out?
- Ease of searching, don't have to wait till someone puts up a torrent
- Guaranteed DVD quality
- You can't get caught unless the MPAA starts kicking down doors at random to check your physical collections
- It is so much easier, and requires very little effort
Also, I just got a DLP projector...watching something off the HD is quite easy or even a burned DVD since I run everything through the media computer, videos, dvd's, mythtv...etc. With Netflix, I spend far less time and effort than it would take to search out,download, RAR, unRAR, etc...to get what I want to see. Especially if it is a movie that is older....Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
I've been using NetFlix for about 6 months, and have only rented about 5 movies. For the money I've spent, I could have owned all of those movies.
I keep telling myself it's worth it because next month I'll just rent 10 ($1.50/each).
But as I type, I have 2 movies I've already watched that I've been meaning to drop in the mailbox since Friday.
I found myself watching movies just to get rid of them, much like how you have to eat all the food at a restaurant, even if you are full. I felt like I was obligated to watch what I'd queued, so I'd better spend two hours before sending it back. It's no surprise that watching a movie because you feel you have to is not very satisfying.
The converse of this paradox is also one. Accumulating as much of a product as possible to maximize the value of the monetary expense, even if doing so adversely affects your enjoyment of that product, illustrates a strange consequence of consumerism.
The obvious example is that of the person who consumes far beyond a comfortable and enjoyable amount of food at an all-you-can-eat buffet. The value for the price is determined to be "volume of food" rather than enjoyment of the meal. Would someone consciously pay for a sick stomach?
For some, Netflix is approaching this valuation on "volume of movies" rather than convenience or even personal enjoyment/satisfaction of the service.
this isn't netflix complaining that people are keeping movies too long- in fact they encourage it both outwardly and covertly.
The point of this article is that when people don't feel pressure to return it, the movies sit around forever (which netflix makes great money on).
We usually have one of our 5 that sits around for a long time until we're ready to watch it (usually something serious), but the other 4 usually go back a day or so after they come in.
I used to spend nearly the netflix monthly fee on late fees at our local rental places- we have a two year old and being able to finish a movie in one sitting is somewhat rare unless we stay up.
This reminds me of when I was a kid and had my first 8 bit computer - for the first few months I bought all of my software one tape at a time. I would play the games, good or bad all the way through - picking through every nugget I could find, playing some games for weeks on end.
Some time later - I met a friend at school who had the same computer and offered to bring his disks over. Holy cow - he must have had two hundred disks of software that I spent a weekend or two copying. That pretty much killed it for me since I didn't really have any pressure to play anything and since I didn't invest anything into the software - I would just load a game, decide it didn't look all that great and move on to the next.
www.wildpad.com
...they've discovered Netflix's well-advertised business model. That's some investigative, in-depth reporting for you. Maybe one day soon they'll discover that Burger King differentiates itself by emphasizing their willingness to take custom orders.
Busy people hate traditional rental stores because you rent some movies, pay for them, get busy and can't watch them, and then return them 3 days later unwatched. Or, equally likely, you return them 6 days later and pay late fees for the movie you didn't watch.
-b
If I wanted a sig I would have filled in that stupid box.
I would get both a debit card and a credit card ASAP. You need to build credit and those two things are easy ways to do it.
/withdraws, I will put that on my credit card and write one check at the end of the month for $200"
They are easy and handy, providing you take the approach, "I have this much right now waiting in my bank account, I can put this on my card and not spend the cash that will be used to pay for it."
Put your regular expenses such as groceries, particularly if they are a regular amount you already budget pretty well.
"Well instead of writing 4, $50 checks
People that think credit cards are evil are simply using them the wrong way. They are great credit builders and a must have for basically everyone (ever been stranded somewhere, good luck with cash...)
The phrase "more better" is acceptable English. suck it grammar Nazis