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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."
I do not understand what cost savings Netflix would achieve by this reduction in service.
Based on the information coming out on this it doesn't look good. Did they research how much this would piss off the current customers? It is coming off like they don't care. Perhaps the profile feature is causing bigger problems behind the scenes. If it is the later then they should find better programmers to work around the problem(s).
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
My family uses it and its only been a positive. I'm betting a bean counter marketing type suggested that it might force me to get separate accounts if I couldnt use the separate queues.
I think they're trying to get people to pay for more than one account. I don't know what features they could be adding that would warrant dropping sub accounts. I have a funny feeling this is going to backfire and they'll lose more people than they gain.
Touching. I'm reminded of a sign I once saw on the door of a bank branch, some years ago while I was living in Boston:
For my convenience. Heartwarming, isn't it, how these folks are always looking out for us.I think profiles are causing a real PITA for the site programmers to maintain code and scrapping it all together will allow faster and more flexible programming models.
My boss' response to that kind of reasoning? backed up by the marketing department, CEO, and customers? "Cope."
Massively degrading the user's experience is not excused by programmer's convenience.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
Why is the iPod successful? It just works.
Netflix Profiles "just works". I have my queue of 150+ movies, and without further effort the movies I want show up in the order I want, one at a time; ditto for my wife, who being home more than I am gets two a at a time. NO EFFORT.
Now you, and Netflix, pull the "quit whining, it's EASY to get the same thing, just go reshuffle the mutual queue..." without realizing that now that we've _made_ our lists (over 300 movies total), now we have to go _update_ that list every day. That doesn't "just work", that takes constant fiddling when we've got plenty of other things to do.
On top of that, our wildly different tastes (sappy chick flix vs. sci-fi noir & grusome action) means that the "suggestions" tool is useless. One of us gets on to review suggestions, and half the stuff suggested will be undesirable (never mind any bizzare half-breed "because you liked '27 Dresses' and 'Akira'...").
Profiles worked. It's extremely useful to some customers. Fix the code; don't wreck the customer experience.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
Of course the suggestion system doesn't work for you: trying to generate suggestions from a hodgepodge of two different peoples' tastes doesn't work.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
Netflix is pretty obsessed with improving their recommendation system (or at least they act like they are with their prize and such). Won't this make that significantly more difficult? Sure a few people who use this feature will get separate accounts, but I'd be willing to bet the majority will either cancel or just make due with one account. Suddenly having 2 or 3 or more people's queues merged is going to make it a lot more difficult to figure out what individual people actually want and like.
They might not get the movies at the top of their queue that are long wait, but if each family member has their own queue, then it can be assumed that each member has movies they want to see in their queue. So when they return a movie, the next movie they get from their queue will be one they want to see, even if it's the 4th, 9th, or 20th movie down the list. But in a shared queue, with a huge mess of long waits and new releases at the top, it's a crapshoot as to what gets sent out in a given week. One family member might get all the movies that week because everyone else's movies at the top of the queue ended up being short/long waits.
My guess would be that this is DRM related. It probably became very difficult to limit or explain the limit per account. When little Johnny with a separate profile installed the Watch Now feature on 5 of his friends' computers then Dad would be upset with Netflix when he called up trying to make his new Roku work. Or worse, the profiles where allowing people to get around the Watch Now limits. I don't know what the limits are but you can bet that the movie studios require them. With Netflix's push into streamed content, anything that gets in the way is likely to be cannibalized.
I've been a Netflix subscriber for over four years and I've never used the profiles. I never saw a reason for them. But, in reading through the threads here, apparently they are widely used. (Even though I still don't understand why.)
Anyway, here's my theory. Netflix will bring the profiles back but charge a "nominal" fee each month for each profile. Like maybe 50 cents per month. Overtime the fee will be raised to actually increase Netflix's profits.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
I think the reduction of maintenance costs is minimal since the feature is already supported by their software & db. Keeping it going should be very small cost. Taking it out, in fact, will cost b/c they will have to test the changes to the system. Sounds to me like they want to encourage > 1 paying account per household, unfortunate.
Get the Roku box that lets you watch Online Viewing on your TV. It's fantastic. I was using a desktop hooked up to my 52" Samsung LCD to watch Dexter and Law and Order via DVI. With two Roku boxes (one in the bedroom, one in the living room), I rarely watch cable anymore. Netflix: $15/month, Comcast: $65/month. The choice isn't that difficult. Supposedly, Roku will be partnering with Hulu as well to get additional content to the boxes.
Even though they've said the decision is final, I suggest commenting directly on the Netflix blog post as hundreds of others are doing...