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Netflix Creates Qwikster For DVD Only Business
Frankie70 writes "Netflix CEO Reed Hastings just dropped a bombshell. In the wake of a rapid decline in Netflix's stock price last week, Hastings is taking a bold step by separating the DVD and video streaming services. The DVD-by-mail service will now be called Qwikster, and the streaming service will maintain the Netflix brand."
Wow, this is corporate stupidity at its finest. How exactly will this make more people subscribe? The only reason for this is that the CEO is freaked out about a stock drop and is overreacting. If anyone deserves to be fired it is the Netflix CEO. Everyone knows that the most powerful tool in business is brand recognition, and they are just throwing it away. From what I understand most of the people that dropped the DVD service did it because they weren't using it and it was just a good reason to do so. If anything this move will force more people to drop the DVD service as they will lose they que and no one will like having to pay 2 separate bills from same company. Way to go Netflix you just make a small problem much bigger by overreacting. I have a feeling that their stock is going to tank today.
I have been a member for about 6 years. My price has been going up slowly over that time for various reasons, but the recent jump due to streaming forced me to re-evaluate my monthly bill. To my surprise if I dropped streaming and blu-ray my monthly bill would almost be the same as when I first started (back before streaming or blu-ray).
That lead me to believe that their pricing has just been changed to reflect the cost of streaming, they took the initial approach of giving it away for free and now feel they have enough of a user base to start building a business. I can understand they are business and need to charge for the service they provide. So I reduced by DVD plan and kept the streaming plan so there was no monthly impact for me.
However, moving to two independent services is entirely different. As the email from the CEO stated by doing this they are breaking the integration between the DVD and Streaming services. As you stated it is now necessarily to manage both separately, meaning duplicated effort on two different websites. Not only does that waste the customers time it provides less incentive to use both systems. Integration is often what separates a good system from a great system, and that applies to many things we use in daily life and Netflix is no exception.
I can't believe that the Netflix team doesn't understand the value of integration, as much of their past work involved integrating both Steaming and DVD on the current website. I also know that the CEOs long term goal has always been online delivery (hence the name), so maybe this is that first step. But it sure doesn't feel like a step in the right direction, perhaps because the primary differentiator between Netflix and everyone else was the option for both streaming AND physical media in one service.