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Netflix Hasn't Forgotten About Its 4.3 Million DVD Subscribers (qz.com)
Netflix hasn't forgotten about its DVD service, which millions of people still use. From a report on Quartz: The company is touting a new app that DVD customers can use to manage their Netflix queues, search for DVD and Blu-ray titles, and get movie recommendations. Those features for DVD subscribers vanished from the main Netflix app back in 2011, leaving subscribers to manage their accounts on DVD.com. The new app, called DVD Netflix, is currently only available on Apple's iOS in the US, which is the only country the DVD service is offered in. About 4.2 million people in the US still rent DVDs from Netflix.
I'd call it Qwikster, announce it out of nowhere without researching the name or securing it in any way, then take it out back and shoot it.
The resulting press release would translate roughly to "lol oops"
A service to buy crap that you can download for free and it's only available to Apple users. And the media suckers wonder why people pirate movies?
WTF is up with netflix that it only does move to the top? I really and truly do want to move something to the bottom. Why do you make me drag?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
...where I can DL full quality uncompressed BluRay quickly...
It made perfect sense for Netflix to spend a lot of capital replacing the DVD rental model and all its shuffling of fragile plastic between shelf space and mail, with streamed downloads. Given a suitable backup strategy, server-based files can last forever.
The problem was not technical, but legal. Netflix streaming servers have been stuck with an artificially limited selection of TV shows and movies that "expire" and have to be deleted. Until we see a basic change in IP law, the best film library will be DVD forever.
If this is a NEW app, then it proves exactly the opposite of the article headline. Indeed, Netflix HAS FORGOTTEN its dvd subscribers and has only just now suddenly remembered them after a long period of neglect. (psssst . . . hear that Apple?)
But such is corporate and government speak. Whatever they say is a euphemism for something that means the opposite. An attempt to disguise something. It doesn't fool anyone.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
... it's 4.3 Million DVD subscribers... just the 4.1 million of them using Android since Apple users were probably the most likely to jump ship to streaming only.
I dropped the disc service a while ago, but there's a lot of stuff they don't offer streaming that you can get on disc. Maybe that was their plan all along - make the streaming options so crappy that people will go back to the DVD subscriptions.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
i mean really? it's 2017.
I couldn't give two shits about some stupid "app". I'm an avid DVD renter from Netflix, and their service is dogshit, now.
- The most you can rent is two at a time
- Their library is dwindling fast. Right now, 1/3 of the movies in my queue are unavailable, with no eta as to when (if ever) Netflix will ever have the DVD's in stock again.
I would switch to a better service (and pay more money) if there were a better service. For now, I'm supplementing Netflix with my public library.
I don't respond to AC's.
.
I have also seen DVDs shipped from the other side of the country, taking three or four days to arrive. In those instances Netflix used to ship the next in your queue from a local warehouse, to tide you over the wait. It appears they don't do that anymore --- you wait for the cross-country shipment.
For me, the most important indicator of the deteriorating quality of Netflix's DVD service is that I no longer get emails asking me about the length of the delivery times. To me that shows Netflix no longer seems to care about delivery times.
But they have a shiny new app for Apple phones...
I've noticed similar behavior with 2 other vendors that I use a lot lately -- they'll kill a feature or way of doing something, then build it back in slowly over time. Meanwhile, the end user is stuck with reduced features. I think I'm not Agile enough to understand how this helps.
Example 1 -- VMWare -- after announcing that they were effectively killing the VSphere Client Windows application, they announced a replacement -- the Flash-based web client. Oops, all the browser manufacturers started dumping Flash, _and_ VMWare admins hated it anyway. So now, they're slowly re-introducing a new HTML5 based client that only has basic features, but gets new ones with every release. You have to run the Flash client anyway to do anything beyond basic admin stuff in this latest build.
Example 2 -- Citrix -- During their heart attack-inducing takeover by a hedge fund, they merged XenApp and XenDesktop into a single technology stack to save development money. XenApp (arguably the #1 killer app for healthcare application delivery) actually lost features for several versions in the early 7.x environment while the development teams were building them back into the XenDesktop model. It wasn't uncommon to hear "Oh yeah, this doesn't work in 7.3, it's scheuled for 7.7" or similar.
I'm all for continuous integration, agile development and all that, but does it make sense for enterprise applications to follow the same model of a consumer service like Netflix or Facebook?
If you like Blu-rays http://www.store-3d-blurayrental.com/ has tons of stuff. They'll even find it if it's not in stock. It's a bit more expensive though.
I have a 3 DVD out at a time plan, so I have no idea what you are talking about here.
But the 1/3 of the movies being out seems plausable. I can't say it's that much, at least in my queue, but there's some gaping holes that have developed due to lost discs (like in multi-disc TV show sets) and they don't get replenished. What's worse is I know Netflix sells a lot of their inventory through discount retailers under a white-label and the fact is that's even dwindled down to a slow trickle.
DVD is a dying format, unfortunately, and Netflix knows it.
They can't improve fast enough. Between the increasingly long waits for long tail content and the increasing likelihood those titles will simply drop off the list entirely and enter the Netflix twilight zone they cynically call "Saved" never to return, and the increasingly long turn-around times for their mailers, when once you could rely on 2 films per week, now you're literally lucky to get only one, which doubles my costs and halves theirs, I'm seriously longing for the old life-in-the-slow-lane video stores they killed off. It really does amaze me a competitor hasn't emerged to challenge this ambivalent giant. Some optimism but mostly sheer inertia keeps me from cancelling. I really try to cut down on torrenting but they keep pulling me back...
I totally understand DVD is not a growth center and never will be again. I don't think its to much to ask that they replenish the missing disks to a series though or failing that at least remove the series from the library as it effectively doesn't exist anymore.
Its also kind of weird they developed an iOS app for this at all if its just a vestige of past.
There are large parts of the USA without access to the internet. hell, I have been places where there are people living and there are no telephone access (wired) or cell service.
Amazing!
- The most you can rent is two at a time
I have five checked out at this moment.. is this something just for new customers?
Usually I buy DVDs for the kids, rip them to my linux machine which are served up with serviio to my WDTV/Roku boxes.
There have been times that I haven't been able to rip the DVD because of protection on the disc. So I have downloaded a copy to put on my media server.
I have only done this on a few occasions, but when I did it was actually faster to download it than to rip it.
So I will assume that your "pirating movies" comment was meant for those people who actually pirate movies.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Netflix HAS FORGOTTEN its dvd subscribers and has only just now suddenly remembered them after a long period of neglect.
I don't think that's really true at all. The disc management part of Netflix has been around forever and has gotten better over time, both in performance and usefulness - even as the size of my disk queue has grown.
A new app now just for disc subscribers DOES show they are still thinking about said customers, because Netflix could just as easily have let everyone keep using the web interface until discs went away.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
DVD is a dying format,
I guess I'll have to switch to HD DVD.
Have gnu, will travel.
It's the Hollywood studios who make the artificial distinction between DVD/Blu-ray rentals and streaming rentals. They're both ways to get the same bits to your TV, just one does it on a plastic disc, the other does it over wires. But since Hollywood controls the supply and has contsitutional rights to control "distribution", their illogical world-view is what counts. So Netflix (and other rental/streaming companies) have to negotiate separate licenses for rental rights vs. streaming rights. And Hollywood execs have this weird world-view where there must be a delay between theater releases, followed by pay-per-view releases, followed by disc sales, followed by subscription services, followed by syndication on TV. So streaming selection (lumped with subscription services) will always be a step behind disc rentals (which are lumped with disc sales).
Also, the poor Netflix support for Android was also because of Hollywood. They're extremely picky about authorizing ways to decrypt streamed movies. There are basically two ways - a hardware device, and a software device. Software authorization is what's used when you stream Netflix (or Hulu, or HBO Go) on a browser. Hollywood requires the software be run in an encrypted virtual machine with the video stream piped directly to the display, so there's no way for the end user to grab the decrypted video stream and save it. This means special video decoding hardware built into GPUs can't be used, since the encrypted VM runs entirely in the CPU. Phones and tablet CPUs aren't yet powerful enough to do 1080p video decryption in the CPU. So Netflix had to make the Netflix app use the GPU's video decode hardware on Android and iOS. But that meant they had to get their app authorized as a hardware device. For iOS this was relatively easy since there only about a half dozen new iOS devices released each year. It was an entirely different story for Android since there are hundreds if not over a thousand Android devices released each year. Netflix had to get Hollywood's authorization for running the Netflix app on each one of these different Android devices one at a time.
Well ... since we're talking about a U.S.-only services, they're technically only forgetting about roughly 108 million Android users.
Breakfast served all day!
My theory on Qwikster was that Netflix signed something w/ the movie publishers saying that they had to pay an amount based on how many Netflix customers there were ... and so they tried to make it so millions of people no longer qualified as 'Netflix customers'.
If Netflix had come out and said 'yes, the name's stupid, but we're doing this to say FU to the movie industry', people would've loved them. (but they would've shot themselves in the foot for whenever they had to renew those contracts)
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Hrrmmm.... Don't care about an "app" -- I just want to be able to go to netflix.com in a real web browser, and quickly manage my streaming queue AND my DVD/bluray queue -- right now, it's a PITA because when you're looking at the disc detail for a title, it won't tell you whether it's available on streaming, which it did for years, but is gone now.
It's annoying to have to load up two tabs, and do a search for the title on both sites to figure out if I need to order the disc or can watch on streaming, especially since the streaming catalog changes all the time. It also used to tell you right in the disc queue if a title was available on streaming. Also gone.
The disc queue is AWFUL now if you have more than a few dozen titles, it takes forever to load and times out with a browser warning half the time before it paints the whole screen. I guess I could purge out a lot of crap I might never watch, but I shouldn't have to. They should be able to write an interface that can quickly and easily display 400 items in a modern browser. Their old interface (2-3 years ago) handled it just fine, and my queue was much bigger then.
I'd cancel the disc feature, but there are a LOT of titles they only have on disc that I'm not interested in buying or paying amazon five bucks to watch.
I bet that netflix figured that the studios would be on board by now with streaming for back-catalog stuff (like what spotify did for back catalog albums), so that the disc rental service could just go away for everything but new releases, but apparently the studios still aren't ready to do that.
The only bright side is that their disc library is still getting new stuff added to it weekly, though they might be losing older stuff faster than they add new ones.
I wish someone could figure out how to offer a service that has every film and tv show ever produced available (in some format, don't care what) -- I'd gladly pay $50/month or even more if it was good, even if it didn't have new releases.
I canceled my Netflix streaming service last fall when they raised my monthly charge. I looked at my queue and of the ~200 movies/shows there, less than 10 of them were available on streaming. Not only that, but there's no expectation that streaming will give me access to the newest movies. Done.
Then Netflix removed the New Releasessort by release date option. Before, I'd check the new releases each week, for ONLY the shows released that week. Now, I have to look through hundreds of movies (again and again). This is an excellent indication of their "regard" for their customers.
I like DVDs (or BRs) for two reasons: 1. It is much easier to repeat scenes which you didn't quite catch, or want to watch again. It allows you to multi-task much better than streaming, (theaters allow none, basically) 2. Closed captions - my hearing (and my cheap TV speakers) make it sometimes (more and more often) difficult for me to understand the dialog, especially when there are accents (UK, for instance). I suspect the utility to DVDs will increase for more of us old geezers as us baby-boomers get even more decrepit and senile.
Netflix is not walking away from us, but running.
Netflix seems surprised people are not dropping the DVD service, but a lot of content is NOT AVAILABLE on streaming. I total number of titles it may seem OK, but recent blockbusters generally appear on streaming long after they are on netflix DVD.
I'd love to drop DVDs, but netflix doesn't provide the right content on streaming.
Global market share percentages for Android and iOS was 86.2 vs 12.9 in 2Q2016 respectively. If you make the logic leap that the mobile OS use of the 4.3M DVD subscribers mirrors those percentages, then in reality, Netflix only provided mobile DVD queue management for 554,700 of those customers and left another 3.7M out in the cold.
It's tempting to say that Netflix has indeed forgotten about DVD subscribers given those numbers, but the reality is they probably just didn't want to turn on the firehose just yet, and decided a slower roll out would be better to help identify the problems that can happen at scale.
I can't wait for it to come to Android. I use streaming for shows, and Blu-Ray for movies. That probably won't change until the studios can figure out how to make viable geo-lock model for streaming, or better still, get out of that stupid methodology completely. It probably has something to do with a real esoteric financial construct that requires gross sales over time instead of all up front, like a sliding tax scale based on date of income compared to date of expense.
I'm sorry, but your opinion seems to be wrong.
This would be funny if I didn't, in fact, have an HD-DVD player.
I have had discs with "very long wait" times eventually get to me, a prime example being Life of Brian. It's frustrating it took 9 months, but it did eventually come.
No, apparently OP doesn't know how to read.
Are you serious?
I use it...since all Netflix seems to care about now is their crappy Netflix Originals (though I admit Stranger Things was pretty good).
Everyone without eyesight disabilities should be able to see the horrible compression artefacts in "streamed video", no matter how fast one's Internet connection is, simply because streaming services are cost-optimized by utilizing very low bandwidths. I for one can happily wait for a physical disc delivery in return for a decent, non-crippled picture, coming at a bandwidth about 4 times of the highest "streaming video bandwidths" offered (at the same resolution) by any streaming video service.
I wanted to write you a note and found here a box I could type it in. I was gonna find a service to send it by, but I found I could click "submit" instead of finding a place where I'd send it to. I wanted to include a quote, but I wasn't sure where I'd get it from. I told my friend I was typing this, and, answering the question about what I'd do that for, I said maybe it's less about who you type it to but more about who you type it with. I couldn't put it in the mail, 'cause what kind of paper would I write it on? So finally, I asked, "Where's the library at?" But, we all know what that joke's about.
He may not be exaggerating by as much as usual. Seattle is notorious for its lack of broadband.
Been on NF-DVD for 2 yrs now. Almost zero issues. For a month last year, all deliveries took an extra day - something to do with USPS contract changes. It didn't remain that way. I would have cancelled the service if it had remained.
I have an extra DVD they shipped because it wasn't available locally. This happens about once a month. It isn't predictable. What I find maddening is the number of old TV series missing S1D1.
Sometimes I get the new releases THE DAY of release too. Not always, but enough that it gets noticed.
The DVD back catalog is HUGE compared to the stuff available via streaming.
These days, shipping is overnight both directions. I don't feel ignored. I feel treated like a good customer should.
We use a different streaming service, BTW.
Does it also apply to Redmond?
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
Well ... since we're talking about a U.S.-only services, they're technically only forgetting about roughly 108 million Android users.
So, it's Android users, in the USA, wanting to watch movies on DVD, that Netflix provides, can pay for it, cannot or will not use another service, and are unhappy with the web based management.
I don't know the number of people that describes but I expect the number to be quite small compared to the many other happy paying customers.
I could be completely wrong too.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Before everyone gets all anecdotal - it depends on the neighborhood. Some sucks some are good. Don't all argue at once.
Everyone without eyesight disabilities should be able to see the horrible compression artefacts in "streamed video",
No doubt many people do see the difference, and don't care. "Horrible" is in the eye of the beholder.
I used to watch a lot of broadcast television, VHF and UHF. Picture quality was pretty bad. Never bothered me.
We got a VHS VCR, and recorded shows at EP speed. Picture quality was even worse. We still watched them.
Then my parents moved to a house on the side of a mountain in Vermont; with a 15' antenna on the roof, they got three channels, filled with static. Not only did we continue to watch, we frequently recorded off the air onto those VHS tapes at EP speed. My family kept, and occasionally watched, some of those tapes for years.
These days I have a cheap LCD television, cable, and various streaming services. Cable carries a host of HD channels, which we never watch, because they're numbered higher than the SD ones and no one can be bothered to scroll down that far in the guide.
We have a DVD player but rarely use it. We've never bothered with Blu-Ray; don't see any reason to. (Still have a VCR, too, though I don't think it's been used in a couple of years.)
When my family watches something, we're watching for the narrative. As long as the picture is recognizable, that's probably going to be good enough. And I suspect we're not alone in that.
Compression artifacts = horrible. Torture = horrible. Clearly very similar human problems to be endured and lose sleep over.