Slashdot Mirror
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.
So your rhetorical answer to why people download movies for free because they can download movies for free?
"Old man yells at systemd"
i mean really? it's 2017.
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.
Except their DVD selection has been dwindling as well. It used to be I had only a couple items in the "saved" section of my Netflix DVD queue... and those were movies which had yet to be released on DVD because they were still in theaters. Now I have 39 items - all but one of which used to be in my regular DVD queue, meaning those disks used to be available from Netflix but now aren't.
It seems likely Netflix's real plan is to get people to keep giving them money, but to eventually only offer stuff they're producing themselves. And so far, with me, it seems to be working... out of inertia more than anything else.
#DeleteChrome
Yes, the summary twice says people are "still" using the DVD service, as if it's an Abacus. Especially if you like some obscure and/or non-US movies, the DVD inventory is the only place to find most of what you want to watch.