First let me say that my experience with Netflix overall has been good. In fact, they are probably single handedly responsible for the failure of Blockbuster. I liked Blockbuster once upon a time, and rented many a movie over the years. One day they decided to change the return policy to consider noon late, rather than 6pm as was previously observed. On this day, my video returned that afternoon was charged a late fee. I told the manager if they did not waive the fee, I would never return. They did not, and I never again entered their door.
One of the main reasons they were so easy to discard was the emergence of Netflix. A wonderful service that would mail DVDs to your door for a fixed monthly fee. As many as you could possibly watch! Well, here was in fact the first snag. They began to throttle some customers. I never encountered this myself, and don’t think it’s all that out of line. As long as it’s stated in the TOS, it’s fine with me.
Now the trend is to online delivery. This has been a goal for so many years, and the technology has finally caught up. Netflix now offers quite a bit of material for “instant viewing”. Well, if you are using Internet Explorerer, or one of a number of supported devices that is. They claim it works with Firefox 2.0+, but I have not been able to get instant viewing to work with Firefox 3.X. Some of the content is encoded at decent quality, and some not quite so much.
Is Netflix to blame? I don’t think so. Could be wrong here, but I suspect there are two causes of this problem. Stupidity, and DRM. It still amazes me that so many of the content providers still do not understand how this all works. Had they led the effort to deliver online at a reasonable fee, much of the piracy so many of these same folks complain about would be a non isssue. We saw the same dissapointing effort (or lack thereof) from the music industry in past years. TEN years or so after online music delivery has been underway, DRM has now been removed. Woo hoo!
The old folks that run the film industry need to take a good look at the real cause for declining sales. There was another technology they once feared. It seemed to spell doom for the entire movie industry back in the 1950s. It was called…. wait for it… television.
I love Netflix and have had the service for several years almost as long as the service has been offered. I opted to get 3 video disks per week but recently after their price increase I cut it down to one disk per week. Now I watch a lot more streaming video. I think the streaming video is a great idea but it still falls short due to only the new releases coming out on disk. About 20 percent of the internet’s bandwidth at night is taken up by people streaming Netflix videos. Though you would think that America has a great internet system it still pales in contrast with other countries, not to mention the higher cost in the US for internet packages that offer faster downloads and more bandwidth. Other countries already have the bandwidth and can download enormous amounts of information. Although things are better than they once were, we still have a lot to go in order to catch up with countries like japan. Now if Netflix could offer first run movies through their streaming service they would be tops in my book.