When Netflix announced back in July that it was splitting its streaming and disc-mailing services and increasing monthly prices by 60% as of the September billing period, many people were outraged. There were thousands of articles about the death of Netflix and the emergence of other home-viewing alternatives that would further drive it into the ground. Many customers threatened to cancel their subscription, and some even did. Most subscribers just changed their plan to either just include streaming, just mailed discs, or streaming and one mailed disc at a time. I was just as outraged as everyone else when the news was announced, and even considered scaling back my plan as well. However, I just could not bring myself to do it. I decided to bite the financial bullet and keep the plan I had since I became a subscriber three years ago for one reason only: I am a Netflix junkie.
Yes, even though Netflix is doing everything it possibly can short of threatening physical violence against its customers to make them terminate their subscriptions, I have chosen to stand defiant and pay the now twenty dollars per month. I view it as a statement that I am pathetically unemployed and am solely reliant on Netflix to get me through these tough times. If that isn’t a ringing endorsement of Netflix, then I don’t know what is. Reed Hastings, look into your heart and make that part of your effort to turn around the public image of your company. I guarantee that shares in Netflix will rise from the 50% decline they have undergone since you raised your prices.
The main problem facing Netflix now is that it is no longer cool. Everything that has happened over these past few months reminds of the scene early in The Social Network when Mark is telling Eduardo why Facebook cannot have advertising because that would not be cool. Like Facebook (which is currently having some “coolness” issues of its own), Netflix was incredibly cool. There was no outside advertising on the website, they had an incredibly efficient business model, an unprecedented selection of titles both on disc and streaming, and it was affordable enough for tens of millions of people to subscribe to it and enjoy its wares. Also like Facebook, “Netflix” became a verb, the ultimate sign of cool. If someone wanted to check out a movie he or she heard about from a friend, he or she would just “Netflix” it. I could not go anywhere without running into someone who was a Netflix subscriber. Talking about our respective queues made for passable small talk. Being part of Netflix was the being in the popular group in high school if the popular group consisted of half the school instead of a select few. Unfortunately, Netflix’s entire coolness quota vanished the second it revealed that it was not only going to split streaming and disc-mailing services on our bills, it was also going to split the services into two separate websites as well. The streaming would still be Netflix, but the mailing service was now called The-Website-That-Must-Not-Be-Named-Because-It’s-Such-An-Abominable-Name-For-A-Website-That-It-Makes-Me-Think-Reed-Hastings-Watches-Too-Much-Jersey-Shore (phew). Seriously, I will never say the name of the true name of that site, yet I won’t call it TWTMNBNBISAANFAWTIMMTRHWTMJS either. We’ll call it Prickster and leave it at that. What makes Prickster even more uncool is that it does not actually exist yet! At least when you announce something is launching, you should give a date for when it is coming (see new IPhone), but Netflix has not even given its customers that courtesy. I honestly looked around the web for a good fifteen minutes for anything about when Prickster would go online, and all I found was that some guy had The-Website-That-Must-Not-Be-Named as his Twitter handle (for his own sake, I hope he changed it).
And yet in the wake of all these horrible things I have just said about Netflix, I just can’t quit it. It still has a wider selection of DVDs and streaming titles than its competitors and the discs still ship in only one business day. But most importantly, Netflix has been the key in expanding my entertainment horizons and giving me a passion for the arts that I hope to preserve for the rest of my life. Without Netflix, I would not have seen thousands of wonderful films that have contributed to my enriched cultural palette, and I look forward to seeing thousands more. Unless, of course, they raise the prices again, but they couldn’t be THAT stupid, could they? Could they? Oh, screw it, at least they have Breaking Bad on streaming now.
No comments:
Post a Comment