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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
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
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,
find their privates are on the Internet.
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.
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.
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
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.
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
We hav Zip.ca up here in Canada. It's kind of interesting to hear about this because I have a different approach to how I do things, and Zip's somewhat *ahem* silly queing system does have an option to make it useful: Park.
What I do is arrange on my active "Can send" list (Normal priority in Zip speak) the stuff I know I would watch, and then use ASAP priority to move up things I definitely will watch if I receive it. Anything else I feel I wouldn't watch, I send to the Parking lot (Park priotiy).
Arbitrarily ranking the queue (which I understand Netflix allows) is handy if you know you're going to watch things, but maybe they need to ask the user: I REALLY want to watch this, I wouldn't mind watching this, and "Eh, a friend told me i should watch it".
The bitter lessons of a veteran coder: http://bitterprogrammer.blogspot.com
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.
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.
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.
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.
But I'm not a Netflix subscriber. Just not big into movies.
But the bigger and more complicated a decision, the easier it is for me to decide. Choosing a college: Simple. I went, I looked, and by the time I needed to apply, I'd already decided. Only applied to 1 school. (Graduated 3 + years ago, picked up a dual Engr. degree, and had a blast). Buying a car? Simple. I knew what I wanted. Buying a house? Simple. (Going on 2 years now, still satisfied).
But man... you put me in front of a vending machine and I cannot make up my friggin mind. I'm not kidding. I can't decide. I'll stand there staring at it. Speaking of which.
"No fair, you changed the outcome by measuring it!" - Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth
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
My job has been very busy lately, and Elder Scrolls IV wandered into my life, so I simply cut back my Netflix account to two out at a time down from four. I can just about slip in two movies a week. If I can't do that, I'll cut back to one. There's also the "rip to hard drive" option to backlog films.
Feeling "pressure" to watch a movie? What would these "paradox of abundance" sufferers do if they had to go out and hunt a wooly mammoth for dinner? Cripes, take a Paxil or something.
I had a further point to make, but I think I'll just say wooly some more. Wooly. Wooly. Wooly wooly wooly.
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.
It's called the Gold's Gym model.
Prof. Farnsworth - "Oh a lesson in not changing history from Mr I'm-My-Own-Grandpa!"
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?
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
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
...that all Netflix users had burners, or at the very least, knew out to rip to divx!
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
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.
DVDShrink
Just copy them one after the other after the other and slide 'em into a disk wallet and when you get the urge just watch one.
I of course would never violate copyright law in such a flagrant fashion. Just saying...
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.
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
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
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).
...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.
But I actually buy the DVDs and fail to watch them. Sounds like I need a Netflix account.
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.
As a republican I feel it my responsibity to manufacture criminals. People need punished!
I use peerflix in combination with my local video store. Like netflix, with peerflix You can keep the movies you have as long as you want to. Peerflix is like netflix except you pay per trade not a fixed monthly fee. So hanging on to movies incurs no penalty of cost. (it's about $1.50 per trade ).
I use peerflix for three purposes
1) for movies my local store does not have on hand.
2) for movies I want on hand but am not sure when I will watch: e.g. classic movies for a rainy day with my wife or a Jackie chan flick for me late at night
3) for new releases, which are more expensive to rent (say all of 24).
4) to dispose of movies I own already. (e.g. DVDs my kids have outgrown)
I still go to the local video store for the same reasons you do, but I also have on hand a nice cache of movies at all times without payint the netflix monthly rental fee while they gather dust.
The downside of peerflix is the following:
1) you can't get new movies without trading back the ones you have. But it's not as simple as just sending them in. You have to wait for someone to ask for them. For some movies, like say 3 stooges, or a too popular but now forgotten film, that might be a long long time.
2) You can't just get a movie you want. Someone has to list it to send, and you might be way down on the waiting list.
3) If you accumulate too many movies no one wants. Then you will have to buy more movies just to have something you can trade to get the ones you want.
4) there's a weird dynamic that happens that forces you to get more old releases than new releases. old releases cost 1 point, and new releases cost 3 points. If you have 3 points in your account and you are sent three old releases, then when you go to trade chances are not all three movies will get requested at the same time. This means when you trade the first one, you get one point, and then peerflix arranges a trade for you and since you only have one point to trade, you get sent an old release. Thus you never accumulate enough points to get a new release sent to you...
the last thing is the most annoying to me.
5) their website is badly organized and browsing is painful. their customer service is non responsive.
6) you have to print out and tape up the envelopes to send your dvds. there's no "red envelope"
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.