Dan Frommer:
It communicated change poorly, again.
It made customers feel like they weren’t Netflix’s priority, which is unusual for Netflix.
Okay, so Netflix may not communicate well, but I have no problem with what they did.
∞ Where Netflix screwed up
Apple is dropping optical disk drives from its computes. Netflix also sees the writing on the wall. So should its customers and stop the complaining.
Completely agree. The way I see it, naturally raising their rates on the mail business and losing the Starz partnership was going to result in some loss of customers and some drop in the stock price. Nothing they could really do about that. But their amateurish PR people probably account for about half the dip in their stock price. Poor use of the English language resulted in a $4 billion unforced error by NFLX.
I would be okay with Netflix marginalizing the DVD business and customers /if/ the streaming business was a viable substitute. But it’s not. Not only is only a sliver of the movies available on DVD also available on streaming, but much if the top tier stuff is missing. Further, when titles are on streaming, they have arcane availability windows, and disappear overnight. I get the state of streaming isn’t Netflix’s fault, but they shouldn’t try to push everyone to streaming, when it clearly isn’t ready to take the place of DVD.
Exactly. AND now we have to manage queues on TWO websites, looking up availability on each to decide between streaming and mailing. How is that good for the customer?