I only care about the Netflix / Qwikster Customer Experience
My mail / news reader produced a collection and summary of 40 different articles about Netflix’s imminent implosion. I don’t care about whether Netflix will Blockbuster itself sooner rather than later. But I do care about the customer experience.
Patti is the main Netflix user in our household. I rarely, if ever, use the web site or watch the movies. And we rarely go to the theater except to see things that we really want to see on a big screen or when they first open. But, we consume a lot of movies. We subscribe to pay movie channels, DirecTV, and Patti uses Hulu, while I use Amazon and Apple’s iTune’s store to download copies of Sharktopus that I never seem to watch.
Apple’s service is more convenient than Amazon’s, but it doesn’t allow me to put movies on our large televisions because I don’t own an Apple TV. Amazon’s service was useful when we had a TiVo, but that’s gone. So, now we never use it because it doesn’t fit our lifestyle. Netflix works for Patti, but she’ll never have a DVD player in her computer again, which is going to complicate her use of the DVD service.
This leads to my conclusion as a customer: Netflix is too early to separate the DVD and streaming service. “Just right” would occur when people were closer to ending their use of DVDs. But, and this is a big “but”, what is a better service? Are we going to cancel our membership because of the new hassle?
We won’t cancel our membership because nothing else is better. Apple and Amazon and the other solutions are too expensive, on a per unit basis, for Patti’s consumption of the media. But it’s closer now.
So, do I think Netflix did the right thing? I don’t have the data to know. And most of the other commentators don’t have the data or aren’t using it to guide their opinions.
