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Netflix Woes Mean a Gap In Shipments
Loopback writes "It appears that I'm not the only one waiting for my NetFlix movies. It seems they are being bitten in the rear by their home-grown proprietary inventory management system. 'Netflix has been facing shipping delays and outages in its distribution centers for the last two days and is fumbling to find a fix. The tab is roughly $1.8 million to $3.6 million in revenue a day.'"
I shipped back two DVDs on Tuesday then got the notice they were received on Wednesday. Today (Thursday) I got the notice from Netflix that shipments might be delayed, but I also received two DVDs in the mail (the correct DVDs that were next in my queue). What I did not get was the normal notice from Netflix that they had shipped me anything.
Redbox is a really good service. Recently We've canceled out netflix and gone to useing redbox exclusivly...HOWEVER we did this for one main reasons. - We were'nt returning movies to netflx fast enough to make it worthwhile...we'd get the movie and delay watching it until at least the weekened...sometimes the next. If you turn over your movies fast enough netflix is still a better deal. Redbox is nice if all your looking to see is fairly new releases...but you can't beat netflix when it comes to talking with someone and reliseing they've never seen $clasiccult_movie , you log in put it on your list and soon you be edjumacating them on some fine point of movie history they have missed out on. Also the ability to rent series and have them send you the next episode disks is kinda nice. My wife had always wanted to watch the show farscape, but neither of us had really follwed it. for the next two monthes or so we had netflix send them all to us and we watched it from begining to end. -You can't do that with redbox.
I Need someone to rebuild a Digitech Digital Delay pedal for me....for me...for me...for me.
They're even cooler than just that.
I've been using them a long time with the 3 disk unlimited plan. One day my girl broke a dvd. Her response: "Let's just mark it as never arrived."
Being all into personal accountability and shit I told her "no, we'll say we broke it and pay for it. We did in fact break it."
Their response: "Do you want us to send a replacement?"
No charge for disk. Nothing. I guess if you don't abuse the shit they overlook the occasional accident.
Living in Colorado, I have more than a few discs that are broken in the mail during winter, I assume due to the cold-hot cycles.
They replace them for free, no comments asked.
It has been like that for the 5 years I have been with Netflix.
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
You don't need this outage to be disappointed.
I did the trial membership. It takes about 3-4 business days to receive a disc (if it is not in high demand) and 3-4 business days to be registered as returned. Half of the discs I received were scratched so as to be unplayable (tested on several different players). At that rate (3-4 useful rentals per month) it is not worth the $17 per month.
Excellent concept, poorly implemented.
Maybe it depends on where you live? I have a "1 disc at a time" subscription and routinely get two movies a week. I have yet to receive a disc I can't watch and my only problems (once in three years) was getting the wrong disc ( the cartoon version of a real life movie I'd asked for)
. waterwingz
One or two of them actually re-appeared later, not sure if they were found in the back of a truck or if Netflix lost them.
There have been a couple instances now where postal workers were investigated and found to have stolen hundreds of random DVDs from their routes. I also heard of one instance where kids were going through the mailboxes in a neighborhood. Since these incidents are detected, I suspect NetFlix and the post office share data about who loses DVDs and what postal worker's route they are on.
I'd be more interested in what their database system is. I'd like to know whether to laugh (you knocked this up in MS ACCESS???) or to cry (LAMP stack MySQL) or to fear (Google BigTables) or to fly ("actually it was in an Access spreadsheet and we just exceeded 32k rows on one little bit of it and the macro couldn't handle it and my cousin who works at a bank put it together one week, and we have most of it on a Notepad file but...).
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Actually, how long before they offer a discount if you opt into a "direct handoff" network? When you return a movie, instead of shipping it back to netflix, you print out a label for the next member and slap it on the mailer.
Sure, there's a ton of problems, but it could cut their overhead by up to 60%: they spend half as much on postage and the disks are in flight for one day instead of two each transaction. The savings aren't so much in postage as in inventory reduction: for a popular movie that stays out two days at a time, you cut the postal overhead from 50% to 33%.
Huh? You're going to get killed by late fees with RedBox then. The reason you're switching to RedBox is the very reason I'm dropping it; $1.50 sounds like a cheap rental, but it's usually at least $3.50 by the time we return it (e.g. rent on Friday, return on Monday).
They could implement tracking on each piece, and find out where these are getting stolen.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OneCode
is the newest version of the barcode to be used on all mail starting next year. It will allow for optional individual piece tracking.
Currently they can also do this with a second barcode called a PLANET code.
These extra barcodes add about 1 cent per piece. The scary part is they probably have figured it out to be cheaper to eat the loss, or let their insurance company eat the loss, than to pay an extra 1 cent per piece.
Their postage costs are actually quite high. There was also talk during the recent (may 07) rate/size changes the Post office implemented of a 17 cent surcharge:
http://www.hackingnetflix.com/2007/12/usps-considerin.html
The funny part is that anyone doing the volume netflix is can get direct discussion with the post office. Apparently they pick up at the post office. I believe blockbuster talked about having postmen scan dvd's upon pickup to save time, but I don't know if that happened.
how long before they offer a discount if you opt into a "direct handoff" network?
In my country at least, bulk mailers get substantial discounts compared to consumers, because their mail is properly and clearly addressed, and presorted before it enters the mail system. So instead of the mail company OCRing all Netflix's outgoing mail on arrival to send it to the right distribution depot, it comes prepacked by distribution depot. Less cost for the post company, less cost for Netflix.
It probably works similarly in the other direction; you put a netflix DVD in the post, it gets OCRed, and instead of getting sent to distribution depot foo who sort it again, it drops directly into the 'netflix' bin.
The upshot of this is: Consumer mail gets sorted twice per journey - one sort to the right distribution depot, one sort to the right house. Bulk mail gets sorted once per journey - on the way out from netflix, just the second sort; and on the way back to netflix, just the first sort.
Furthermore if the disks go via the Netflix depot there are obvious benefits for Netflix; they know for sure disks have been sent, they can correct wrong disk errors, they can periodically test disks, they know for sure mail labels are clearly printed and affixed, and they don't need to radically change their already-problematic software system.
In other words, you might never see a direct handoff network because it might not make economic sense due to the existing bulk mail infrastructure.
By charging you for it it you do it too often.
I think this direct forwarding concept is pretty cool.
I used to work there.
Yes, they use virtual machines, but no, it's not VMware. It's a few giant IBM SMP PPC systems running virtual Linux VMs.
Alternatively...
For new/popular titles, the mailer they give you already has the address (but not name - "Netflix Customer") of someone who has the movie near the top of their queue, or is in line waiting to receive it.
The problem with direct mailing is that you can't track it. You don't know when people have returned movies. Then you don't know when to send them new ones. People could just log in and say "Yeah, I sent these 3 out, give me 3 more.".
It's similar to the "I never got it / No really, I returned it!" problem, but it's much more complex. You lose all tracking, and if you allow people to send to people to send to people to send to people, good luck.
You may be able to simplify it by only allowing direct mail customers to send to non-direct mail customers. This itself is still an NP-complete problem (who should send what to who?).
"OMG someone sent me porn!", "OMG I sent my wedding DVD!" and other such issues can be mitigated by printing the sender's address as the return address (or Netflix, with the sender's address on the inside).
With pre-addressed mailers, you wouldn't be able to realistically do more than one level of direct mailing. You could create some crazy flip-flap turn it inside out multi-mailer, and have some crazy scheme for predicting when people will be next in line for a popular movie or when a movie will be at the top of their queue, but you still need to figure out when people will send it out.
Would make for a great experiment with a few (20?) people. It would become a logistical nightmare pretty quickly though.
Apparently it's Oracle. (via reddit)