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Netflix To Eliminate Profiles Feature
Donald Burr of Borg writes "One of my favorite features of Netflix, the video-rental-by-mail service, is 'profiles.' Profiles lets you create 'sub-accounts' for your friends/family, so that they can share in the video rental love. Each profile gets his/her own Netflix queue that he/she can manage with their own login/password. You can divide up how many movies get sent to you vs. the other profiles under your account. E.g. if you have a 6-out-at-once plan, you can choose to get 3 movies at a time, and have 3 other profiles each receive 1 movie. Unfortunately, the fun stops September 1, at which point Netflix is, for unknown reasons, going to terminate this feature. Why? To '...help us to continue to improve the Netflix website for all our customers.' Improvement indeed."
Wrong, the cheapest plan is 1 DVD with 2 per month. The cheapest per DVD plan is 3/time.
The 3/time plan use to be $6/movie, but they dropped the price of that plan by $1/movie as a move to bring Blockbuster Online members back as Blockbuster raised their rates (twice) and by some plans, a massive amount (like 66%).
Tossing out the limited number rental, lowest tier plan, the best deal for any Netflix user is 3/time, assuming you pick a plan that allows you to watch the same number of films a week as you plan allows per time. Meaning, 1 movie a time means you'll watch 1 movie a week, 3 movies at a time and you'll watch 3 movies a week. Which I think it probably about what Netflix expects you to watch and will throttle people to this degree.
The difference is very negligible. That would amount to a cost of $1.41 a movie for 3/time and $1.50 per movie for anything above that. (Assuming the watching habits I described) To round out the numbers, it's $1.75 per movie at 2/time and $2.25 per movie at 1/time (based on a standard 28 day / 4-week month which obviously isn't an exact monthly schedule given most months have more than 28 days)
"The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth." ~1984 George Orwell
I also emailed them with my dissatisfaction with this choice. A good email campaign (no flames, just "I'm disappointed and will vote with my dollars type of email) can help.
Here are the addresses I sent to:
Leslie Kilgore - VP Marketing : lkilgore@netflix.com
Reed Hastings - President: rhastings@netflix.com
publicrelations@netflix.com
oops, forgot the updated/correct email for Reed:
reed.hastings@netflix.com
Well, for those unsure how to begin, please feel free to take this (under the free as in air license) and modify it to fit your taste:
Dear Netflix Team,
I am writing to acknowledge an email I received regarding recent changes in Netflix service. Specifically, the fact that profiles will soon be eliminated from Netflix services.
I would like to express my dissatisfaction at this decision. As a software developer, I realize that maintaining special services are often more costly than they would appear to those enjoying them, and I don't presume to know the efforts behind the excellent service my family and I have been receiving from Netflix thus far.
However, I would like it to be known that the profile feature was the single most important deciding factor in my decision to become a Netflix customer. The ability for different members of my family to control the flow and content of their own queues is invaluable. The loss of this feature will very likely affect my decision to remain with Netflix. It is my sincere hope that this decision might be re-evaluated.
Best regards,
Etc.
I called NetFlix and they informed me that it was a technical issue. The programmer's new upcoming features apparently are buggy when interacting with accounts with multiple profiles and instead of fixing the bugs, the programmers decided to axes profiles.