Netflix is, in my opinion, one of
the greatest things that have happened to movies. The ability to watch almost
any movie any time has changed the way we watch movies. However, in the recent
months the company has made a few changes, and with the changes came upset for
the subscribers to their service.
Back in July Netflix’s CEO, Reed Hastings,
decided with the company to raise the price by 60% for their mail-ordered DVD
service. Their response to this change was simply that it was the costs of
running its business. The second big change Netflix approached was to partner
up with a service called Qwikster, in which the Netflix name would only apply
to the online streaming and the DVD’s and newly added games would be under
Qwikster. Being such a sudden and unusual change, customers were immediately
struck with confusion. A quote from Hastings’ blog explains the reason behind
the changes:
"[W]e realized that streaming and
DVD by mail are becoming two quite different businesses, with very different
cost structures, different benefits that need to be marketed differently, and
we need to let each grow and operate independently. It’s hard for me to write
this after over 10 years of mailing DVDs with pride, but we think it is
necessary and best: In a few weeks, we will rename our DVD by mail service to
“Qwikster”. We chose the name Qwikster because it refers to quick delivery. We
will keep the name “Netflix” for streaming."
Then in less than a month the
company realized that this had become such an unpopular decision that they
abandoned the idea entirely. His explanation for the cancelation of the
proposal was, “It is clear that for many of our members two websites would make
things more difficult, so we are going to keep Netflix as one place to go for
streaming and DVDs. This means no change: one website, one account, one
password… in other words, no Qwikster. While the July price change was
necessary, we are now done with price changes.“
In more recent news the company has
unveiled in their third quarter investor letter that Netflix has lost 800,000
subscribers since the initial price hike. Along with losing so many
subscribers, Netflix’s stocks dropped by 27% in one day. In response to these
plummeting stocks the company unveiled a plan to expand their service to the UK
and Ireland beginning in 2012 and also to expand to other countries in Europe.
The majority of people who are
subscribed to Netflix, including me, only use the online and console streaming
and as long as they keep adding new movies and TV shows, then I am going to
stay a happy customer.
Sources - slashfilm.com
No comments:
Post a Comment