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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.'"
Dear xxxxxxxx,
Our shipping system is unexpectedly down. We received a DVD back from you and should have shipped you a DVD, but we likely have not. Our goal is to ship DVDs as soon as possible, and we will keep you posted on the status of your DVD shipments.
We are sorry for any inconvenience this has caused. If your DVD shipment is delayed, we will be issuing a credit to your account in the next few days. You don't need to do anything. The credit will be automatically applied to your next billing statement.
Again, we apologize for the delay and thank you for your understanding. If you need further assistance, please call us at 1-888-638-3549.
-The Netflix Team
Most Netflix users are mindless fat slobs who wouldn't notice a few days of delay.
Hey, some of us aren't fat!
"The fight for freedom has only just begun." - Geert Wilders
RTFA.
On a related note, I think it's fantastic that a company decided to 'do the right thing' though they were not obligated to do so. Pre-emptively issuing credits to subscribers whose shipments were delayed? Awesome for the customers, and a nice CR move by Netflix. There are many companies out there who would not take the same stance.
This is in addition to Netflix not getting rid of multiple profiles per account, after a vocal minority of subscribers complained.
Is it really possible that Netflix is a company that actually understands that making their customers happy and loyal is a good business strategy? I wasn't sure there were many of those around anymore.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
They've promised to credit user accounts for the interruption in service.
rj
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.
Haven't we all thought, while at work, how in the hell can this company stay in business when it is run so poorly? Well, all that is necessary in order to stay in business, is to run it less poorly than competitors. And then you imagine how other companies could be worse, and you shudder.
I see that ZDnet's Larry Zignan concluded from a 2004 Baseline article that Netflix had startup problems for their homegrown business systems, but he apparently misread the article. It says the system was reworked in 2000, 2002, etc. as customers grew to 1.5 million, but tha's not startup problems, that's keeping with massive growth you wouldn't be able to get and handle if you had startup problems.
rd
Actually this is the best time to have this problem. I haven't even watched the movies I have at home due to the Olympics.
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.
I'll admit fat slob, but not mindless.
how do you watch movies live?, aren't movies kinda, you know, taped?
Redundant?? Really? Check some timestamps, you foolish mod.
According to the moderator's guidelines, a question asked that is answered by TFA deserves to be modded redundant. So sayeth /. !!!
Modding Trolls +1 inciteful since 1999
Netflix has the biggest volunteer distributed backup system on the planet. If they were smart they could have planned for this outage and had their customers supply backup disks to other customers who were not getting shipments on time.
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
We've also had a few disks disappear in the mail, they either never got to us or they never arrived at Netflix after we definitely posted them. It was never a problem, you just mark the disk as missing and that's it. 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. I guess they'll cancel your account if you "lose" a disk per month, but they deal well with the occasional problem.
EagerEyes.org: Visualization and Visual Communication
I thought that netflix took your money every month and then occasionally mailed you a CD as it is able.
Well there's the problem. They're supposed to be sending DVDs!
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.
that site has never rendered quite right with FF... I simply installed the IE Tab add-on for FF and set it to always render Netflix with IE(still shows up in FF). I also found that the interactive map on weather.com requires me to do the same thing....
hope this helps!
DVDs are a poor concept IMO. Discs always get damaged or lost. Downloadable or streaming content is a better idea but Netflix's streamed content has several problems. Limited selection, doesn't seem to think my 15Mb connection is fast enough, doesn't work on my Linux box or my Mac, DRM sucks, watching on a computer sucks anyway, their external device doesn't seem to let you play anything but Netflix content, their external device is ugly, and their external device is $100 up front (can't charge a monthly rental fee if I'd rather?), and downloading seems to not be allowed.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
You say tomato, I say fruit.
Modding Trolls +1 inciteful since 1999
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
I think your experience is very different from the norm. Most people seem to receive a new movie 2 business days after they send back the previous movie.
You say tomato, I say fruit.
What? No funny?
IIRC, after you've lost a few, they start charging you for each one you "lose", but refund you if you find 'em and send 'em back later.
About two months ago, I had this problem for a couple/few weeks with Ubuntu & FF 3.0, but it seems to have been resolved.
They're giving credits to people with delayed movies. They don't say exactly what that credit is (a full month? 1 day's worth per day of delay?) This won't push people to a more expensive plan. The discs aren't shipping, it doesn't matter if you have 2 or 6 in your plan.
The Watch Now service is still available and always usable even when you have discs at home (as long as you have a high enough subscription, 2 discs is enough for that)
you can use the instant viewing through a windows vm in linux, but IE6 under wine doesn't work because the system uses a plugin that connects to windows media player to control the drm etc. I tried for about a month to get it working and failed. Video quality was poor enough under a vm that I just went back to watching in windows.
It seems they are being bitten in the rear by their home-grown proprietary inventory management system.
Because definitely if they had used another company's product or something open source, it could never have broken. Clearly being "home-grown" and "proprietary" is the part that caused the problem.
Make a separate queue for the kids then you can put a restriction on it for G/PG -- I've got that set up for mine and it works like a champ. They can only see and rent G/PG movies (and they get to control their list themselves....of course, I can view their queue as well at any time and make edits :)
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.
If I drop a disk in the mail on Monday, it goes into "Returned" status on Tuesday, or if I use a box at the post office before about 10 AM, it goes to Returned the same day, thanks to their special handling contract with the USPS. The next disk arrives within two days of that, often the next day. Weekends are the exception: they apparently do processing only Monday-Friday.
In the last couple of years I've received no more than two unplayable disks, not counting one that arrived broken.
rj
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).
Netflix charges by the month, not by the disc. Unless they're going to offer a refund, they won't lose any revenue, excepting disgruntled customers who leave.
In fact... since they aren't paying postage, they could actually be saving money, particularly if they told their employees "Too bad, don't clock in for the next few days."
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
I quick Google search comes up with Zip.ca: http://www.zip.ca/dvd/index.aspx
Using Parallels on OS X works fine with Instant Viewing for me, even without any sort of fancy video/3d acceleration turned on.
I've got a 1.66GHz Mac Mini Core Duo. By my standards, it's a pretty nice machine, but also certainly not a powerhouse. On the other hand, if you've got something older, it might be possible that it's not powerful enough to decode the video, even without the performance hit of the VM.
I'm sure that if you have a decent enough machine (ie. good enough to use the feature natively without a VM), and decent VM software, you should be fine. VMWare is still noticeably better than any of the free options in terms of performance and stability. Thanks to virtualization, a VM should run pretty darn close to native speed these days.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
And how are they going to guarantee that I'm not going to send the wrong movie (intentionally or not)?
This kind of option could turn out really bad...
Can you imagine if a sick bastard rents Madagascar 2 and sends pron instead of a kid's movie?
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.
Living in Texas, I have more than a few discs that are full of bullet holes, I assume due to the drunk-sober cycles. And also, many movies just deserve it.
It has been like that since the beginning of time.
Their inventory seems fine to me - I got Roadhouse, Stop Or My Mom Will Shoot, and Battlefield Earth right on time.
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.
After being screwed by Blockbuster for years over late fees and going into stores to find the shelf where the movie I want to see is always empty while the shelf next to it filled with dozens of copies of movies that suck I don't care what kind of problems Netflix may occasionally have and I wouldn't care if their monthly service was twice as expensive as Blockbuster's, I still wouldn't go back to Blockbuster.
And I had the exact opposite experience.
My DVD arrives in one day. It returns in one day (I will grant you that I only live 50 miles from the address on the label).
I have had 2 DVDs that were scratched in the 6 months since I started. They were both replaced in a day (and with 3 disks, I had something else to watch). It was older movies that were scratched (can you believe that I finally saw Vanishing Point a couple months ago?). When dealing with DVDs and clumsy customers there is pretty much no way to avoid this. They can't play every movie after return, so yes, occasionally one can be scratched. I would accuse you of hyperbole by saying it is half unless your sample size was very small.
I have been very happy with their service so far. I canceled all my movie channels on cable and just use them. It is way better because I am the one who says what is on tonight. I'd also be curious where and when you were mailing them. I drop them off at the post office on my way to work in the morning after watching it, and up until this glitch, every time the next day they would process a new one and send it.
I first learned about this an hour ago. I read a good review of Trumbo and logged on to added it to my Saved list... I hit this great big conspicuous notice saying "IMPORTANT: Your DVD Shipments Have Likely Been Delayed."
My first thought was that it was a sales pitch to upsell me to a higher-tiered plan, but no, it was a straightforward notice and apology.
I for one really appreciate this approach. Most companies' SOP would be to say nothing... wait for you to call.. make an individual apology to you without happening to mention that it was affecting thousands of others... and hope you don't read newspapers or Slashdot.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
I got an email from them indicating my shipment would be delayed and I would be credited. However, it did arrive on time. I have noticed no lapse in service.
By charging you for it it you do it too often.
I think this direct forwarding concept is pretty cool.
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.
I've been using Netflix lately to watch TV series. Are they implying now that I'll have to wait AN ENTIRE WEEK for the next episode? That's just cruel and inhumane!