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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.
I would guess that it isn't working properly from their standpoint making it a PITA to maintain and deal with.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
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.
This has been a life-saver for me; rather than having to remember what movies my wife wants to see, and having my movies held up when she takes a week to watch one, I can set her up with her on mini-queue and then not have to worry about it. What Netflix fails to realize is that there is no way in hell I will pay for a separate account for this, and I doubt many other people will, either. I was fairly upset when I got the email, and am considering looking at the Blockbuster service, since I can also use it locally... anyone know if Blockbuster provides something similar to the Profile feature?
"To hope's end I rode and to heart's breaking: Now for wrath, now for ruin and a red nightfall!"
I'd give it a week and some skilled firefox hacker will create some addon to put it back in from the user side.
Sean D.
"Hmm. I am to metaphor cheese as metaphor cheese is to transitive verb crackers!"
According to their customer support, this was a feature only used by 1% of subscribers, but was a significant drain on resources, increased maintenance difficulties, and slowed down adding new features. I don't particularly buy most of that, but if the 1% thing is true, then I can see how they'd make that choice. If more of that 1% convert to full subscriptions rather than cancel, it'll be a win for them.
I've been a Netflix subscriber for over four years. This is the first time they've ever taken a step backwards. And their complete lack justification is very strange.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
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.That's strange because Lovefilm, the dominant DVD-by-mail company in the UK, has only recently introduced this feature.
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I use the profiles feature, but not in the intended way. I keep a separate queue for different types of movies. I currently have 3 profiles. One for TV shows (so I always have 1 Torchwood disc at home), one for mindless action & scifi movies that I can watch without my wife, and one for movies for us to watch together. All the movies are for me, but I've had to create three profiles with fake names. Each time I switch between queues, I have to login again. Any since it thinks each queue represents a separate person, it doesn't remember any of my past rentals or movie ratings.
Personally, when I got the email from Netflix, a little part of me thought 'good... maybe their going to try to do it right this time'
I just called Netflix customer service to ask for clarification on how this helps improve the web site. The rep responded that they needed to free up programming space for better features, and that it's really a tiny, tiny percentage of people that use profiles to separate queues. (Slashdot and Gizmodo, the two sites I checked for reactions to this, are apparently chock full of tiny, tiny percentages.)
When I told her that I'm a programmer and I don't understand what it means to free up programming space, she was quiet for a moment and then said, "This is really a decision that they've already made, so it's not like they're going to change their minds."
I'm all for freeing up programming space. Statistics show that programming space will be all used up in the next 10 years if we don't start conserving it.
Profiles is the only reason I would have switched from Blockbuster to Netflix. Blockbuster was great for my wife and I because we could return movies to the store and get more movies for free (my wife watches a lot of stuff on the days she has off). But we're moving away from any nearby Blockbuster stores this week so I was seriously considering switching to Netflix. I would love it if my wife and I each had our own queue. Then we wouldn't get 10 romantic comedies in a row or 10 action movies. Ah well.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
"I just wanted to share that I am extremely disappointed to see Profiles going away. Profiles have allowed my wife and I to share a netflix account without any marital discord. Now I will have to navigate the horrors of balancing my wife's desire for romantic comedies with my desire for action & sci-fi movies. I will be sure to forward you the transcripts of our arguments so you too can join in the discomfort."
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?
Not only were profiles helpful for queues as stated here, but also for keeping the varied tastes of myself, wife and children separate too. Having gone through and rated a large number of movies, we are now getting *fairly* accurate predictions of movies we might like.
If they actually follow through with this and family/friends merge into one profile, the prediction algorithm will be lobotomized since it will try to predict based on different people's opinions. We'll be back to getting notices like this one that I got before we had separate profiles: Based on your ratings, we think you'll like the following two movies: Bambi Platinum Edition and Scarface 20th Anniversary Edition.
I was in the first wave to join Netflix, and I was a user who, early on, made repeated requests for better ways to manage the queue. What they implemented was a good try, but it was not that for which I was looking. As the account owner, I wanted to be able to manage all queues from a single screen. I despised the way I needed to manage each queue on its own screen (I gave up on profiles at least a year ago, so I don't know if they rectified this).
What I envisioned originally was to be able to manage multiple lists on a single screen: lets call them List A, List B, and List C. When browsing and adding movies to the queue, you still have one button to add movies, but it would have a drop-down option that would let you choose another queue. Thus, the default button action would be the same, but you would have the option of diverting the request. For queue management, I had pitched a system similar to the one the adopted, allowing you to specify how to intersperse the movies from the other queues. For controls, I envisioned parameters only on the sub-queues. Using the names I provided earlier in and example, you could configure List B to send one movie after every three sent on the primary queue. I envisioned being able to drag-and-drop between the lists on the same GUI page. As for others adding their preferences to the queue, the account owner could specify users (by email address) who could logon and add to specific queues, much the way the service was implemented. For younger kids who may not have their own eddresses, Netflix could have allowed the account owner to create logon accounts that would be child accounts and have limited rights. If the owner's logon was thisuser@somedomain.com, for example, I envisioned secondary accounts that could be named subAccountName~thisuser@somedomain.com.
Oh, and yes, I was this verbose in passing my comments on to Netflix. I was pleased that they opted for profiles, but was disappointed by how cumbersome they were to manage. Placing all profile management in a single page view would have gone far in making them easier to use.
I guess I'm disappointed to see Netflix throw out the baby with the bathwater, but they can see that users like me have stopped using the profiles. It reaches a point where the amount of developer support hours and system maintenance tasks invested in a minimally used feature necessitates a pause to rethink the strategy. Hopefully we will see an improved queue management system in the future.
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
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?
Does anyone know if Blockbuster's movie-rental-by-mail program offers separate queues?
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.
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.
Should I keep going? Okay, I cheated and got The Crow from Google Sets :p
it's a blue bright blue Saturday hey hey
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...