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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 know, I'm showing my age, but back when I was in my first year of college I fell for the 10 albums for 1 cent ploy of Columbia Record Club. I paid my couple of $ for the 14 records (you get 10 for one cent, another for putting in some code and for a dollar a piece two more, at the time) and found how they worked. By purchasing you agreed to buy so many records over a two or three year period at "regular prices" which tended to be a bit more than at the local record store. They also sent out, based upon your choice (something Amazon and everyone else tries to do in the decades since) what their computer recommended, which was invariable exactly the music you didn't want, like some universal law, so you had to send back or pay for.
Now Netflix doesn't work exactly that way, as far as I know, but stuff coming in like clockwork isn't the way my tastes for music or film are sated. On impulse I'll suddenly whip out and buy an Etta James collection, because I like some tune she sang back in the days of yor or I'll buzz down to the Bijou and check out Superman Returns From Wherever He Buggered Off To, but I don't do these with any chartable frequency. I tend to buy music, DVDs or old radio plays to listen to on trips or when I feel like it. Having stuff come in on a robotic schedule just isn't going to work, no matter how good the deal.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Don't they mention in their campaign that you can keep a movie as long as you want?
Those who believe the Internet is private,
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Sounds like a win for everyone.
People have the movie to watch at their leisure.
Netflix gets the same monthly fee to have the DVD sit on your shelf.
I prefer to buy used books rather then borrow them from the library just to be able to read at my leisure and not have to worry about returning them.
Yes, and they still make their money. I am a netflix subscriber, and I love their service! A while ago, I had selected all sorts of movies I hadn't seen and was interested in. I rated over 1000 movies that I had seen, and chose about 300 that I hadn't (and should, like those featuring Elvis, John Wayne, Marx bros, etc.). Like the teaser says, these DVDs come in the mail every so often. If I still want to watch the movie, I do. Otherwise, it sits on the mail table until I just send it back, and wait for the next movie.
So, an interesting observation -- quite right in my case. Of course, my SO and I split the 3-movies-at-a-time thing, where I get to choose one, and my SO gets to choose two. I'm mostly not interested in the ones she chooses, and vice-versa. So, if she doesn't watch her movies, I just send 'em back too, and hope something more interesting arives.
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I have NetFlix, I love it. One thing the video store has going for it is when you get there you can choose a movie that reflect your current mood. Do you want something funny, deep or otherwise. With NetFlix you get movies "whenever" they appear on the top of your list plus a few days. While Hotel Rawanda sounded great on Thursday, but Monday really sucked and your not in for an expected downer. And thus the sitting on the coffee table begins.
This reminds me of my experience with video game emulators. I downloaded a torrent that contained about one hundred N64 games, many of them classics. But since there were so many, none of them were really that amusing and I ended up spending about five minutes on a few games before deleting everything.
>> 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.
I, on the other hand, have been watching *more* movies that I really don't care about. With rentals, it's hard to pay good money for crap movies like "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" (currently at the top of my queue). With NetFlix, though, assuming I watch and turn it relatively quickly, I'm only paying $0.80 or so for the rental - and that money is hidden away in a monthly fee that I pay anyway. Given that my tastes wander enough to appreciate B, C, and D-grade science fiction, this is a good deal.
It really does work better than local rental places for me. As soon as we signed up and I realized this, I bought a lot of Netflix stock. That's doing pretty well for me so far, too, so I think I'm not alone.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
Like many of you when I joined Nexflix I thought I had discovered the answer to all my movie watching dilemas. For the first few weeks I was watching and returning movies like a mad woman and spending hours creating a queue that 3 months later is still unmanageable. While I still enjoy my subscription, my zeal for it has subsided somewhat.
I will say that Netflix has 2 great features that will keep me as a customer. First, it gives me access to movies not often found in my local video store. Secondly, it gives me a place to maintain a list of movies that I think I might someday want to see. (Due to a quite enjoyable college experience my memory is not what it used to be and there is no way I could remember all these movie titles!)
On the down side, I have noticed that somehow the Netflix "powers that be" know when I desperately need a quick turn around on my video exchange and somehow make sure that I get my DVD 3 days after I need it.
Complaining about having an abundance of DVDs to watch and an unlimited time frame to watch them in seems a little whiny and spoiled to me. I'll gladly trade my life with anyone who considers this their greatest problem.
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.
I think the stagnation in the movie world (in the US at least) is at least partly due to the selfishness of the baby-boomer generation that runs the studios. They spend too much time reliving their childhoods through remakes, and too little time searching for original content.
I'm sure there are plenty of other reasons too (e.g. theater prices, shorter screen-to-video periods, overuse of special effects- especially CGI), but that one in particular bugs me. Sometimes the classics should just be left alone. E.g. which do you think Steve Martin is prouder of- "Pink Panther" or "Leap of Faith?"
I came, I saw, I left. It looked better in the brochure.
Maybe I'm the only one, but I used to like the record clubs.
... but that's A Bad Thing to do, right kids?), you can really save a lot of money and get a lot of cool entertainment for cheap. But if you either don't use it much and/or then don't cancel, then you're just making some executive's boat payments for him.
I feel a little dirty for saying that now; but this was before I realized that Sony/BMG/Columbia Universal are just various arms of the Great Satan and all that.
I'd do one record club stint every year or so. Basically I'd start making a list of all the albums I wanted, mostly by listening to the radio, or based on friends who had more money than I did and could afford to buy the new releases. Then I'd wait for one of the music clubs to send one of their deals (in later years, one of them had a sweet one, something like '15 CDs for $10 with nothing more to buy ever!') and then go down my list and get all the CDs they had that I wanted. Then I'd cancel it, and spend the next few months / year listening to my new CDs and adding stuff to my list.
Obviously, I wasn't a huge consumer of music. I'm still not, but it let me build a pretty decent CD collection off of my lawn-mowing/summer-job/beer-bottle-return money, which I couldn't have done otherwise at the time. (Well, maybe I could have done almost as well at used-CD/record stores.)
I bring this all up because it's about the same way that I use Netflix today. I go on again and off again with Netflix. I'll basically make up a list, usually starting as a mental one and then progressing to a written one when it gets too long, of all the movies I want to see. Eventually I'll subscribe to Netflix, and over the course of a few months work down the list. When I either exhaust the movies I want to see, or just get bored with watching a movie or recorded TV show every night / every few nights, I'll cancel it.
Right now I'm on my third Netflix iteration (I gave up on the music clubs a while back; I wonder if they're still around?) and about to cancel it, since my interest is starting to peter out.
Whether you can make these systems work for you, or whether you end up being the proverbial sucker that keeps the house in business, depends on your level of patience. If you can bear to not buy anthing for a few months and keep a list of stuff you want to see/hear, and then watch it all at once (or, I suppose, rip it
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Also, you can get them to send you stuff faster and have them cross in the mail. I sometimes drop one in the mail, and then get on their site and list it as missing in the mail...they send you out a new one...and when they receive the one you sent, they take it off the missing list, but, you get your dvd crossing in the mail with theirs....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Background: When Blockbuster (the only rental place within reasonable distance of our home) started charging more than $6 for a DVD rental, then moved their rental store across town, we became Netflix users. We signed up for the "one-at-a-time" service. We used to watch about two movies a month - and wanted to watch more, typically one per weekend. It made financial sense (and saves gas) for us to switch over to Netflix. On any given month, we actually spend less money (on Netflix fees than we used to on Blockbuster rentals). In addition, we almost never have to wait before a given title is available for us to rent via Netflix - with Blockbuster, we'd have to go back more than once to get a given film.
With the background out of the way... when we were renting on time-based rentals, we felt pressure to watch the film right away. The availability of a film in combination with what day of the week it became available always caused us to "rush to watch."
We do not have the dust-collecting issue mentioned in TFA - rather, we just put it on the table and watch it when we're ready. I enjoy films much more when we view them when we want to (as opposed to rushing to watch before the due date/time.). As such, our enjoyment of the films we watch has gone up, the availability is better, and we don't spend gas money to get the films.
I do, however, hear of people (mainly via work) who have the three-at-a-time plan who are now saying, "I don't have the time to watch the films, so they just sit there forever." In this way, it does seem that video rental has shifted in paradigm. I can see the comparison of TFA's mention of abundance and its relationship to the general value of a thing...
On an interesting note (note that the following is opinion and personal observation): of the folks to whom I have spoken about this article- there seems to be a greater demarcation than just availability... folks with children tend to feel that they don't have the time to watch, and folks without children tend to avidly consume their films.
A Passionate Independent Musician
I stopped renting movies from Blockbuster before Netflix was around. I could never return a rental ontime. It was more like a week or 2 after it was do. With the extra late fees added to the rental, it was cheaper to buy the movie. I just bought the movies instead. Of course, this was when I was single and had money to burn.
Now with a wife and kids, there is no time to goto the movies. Netflix is great to catch up on the movies I missed. Plus, I can easily rent questionable movies like King Kong and Napoleon Dynamite without having to pay $50 to see it in the theater ($10 for 2 people, $20 for food, $20 for a babysitter).
There are something like 345 DVDs on my shelves at home and it would not, in a million years, occur to me to actually watch one...
Wow, I don't know if I should call you a consumer whore or if I should try to convince you to send them to me. There must like, 12-20 good ones in there.
I have fewer DVDs, but I only buy movies I know are worth seeing more than once. Full Metal Jacket, Gattaca, stuff that's, you know, good.
You can't take the sky from me...
This isn't just exclusive to Netflix. Back when I was a member, I liked it precisely because I could let the movies languish on the coffe table -
See, I did that with Blockbuster movies too, renting one and not finding the time to watch it in the allotted 5 days. It was *much* cheaper to put off viewing my Netflix movie for a week than it was to rack up $14 at Blockbuster all the time.
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