"Dumbest idea since New Coke, Qwikster, is aborted. Go, #Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, and be stupid no more. (That was strike 2, by the way.)"
Above is a tweet posted by me on October 10. I'd like to expand on it a bit here.
Netflix CEO Reed Hastings did the first smart thing he's done since his ham-handed summer price increase announcement when he smothered the idiotically named Qwikster in it's cradle. My earlier post on this subject highlights only a few of the reasons this was a moronic idea, so I won't rehash.
This move will do little to change the minds of customers and shareholders who have railed against and deserted Netflix in the past few months. But it should at least serve as a pressure dressing on the self-inflicted wound.
Personally, I have thought all along that one DVD at a time and all the streaming I can eat for about 16 bucks a month is a pretty darn good value. My wife, in recovery from a recent surgery, has probably gotten two months of value from the streaming in the last two weeks.
The most concerning thing to me about the lasting effects of this debacle is that Netflix will be handcuffed for quite some time to come in terms of making needed price increases to the streaming service. Sorry to splash a cold bucket of reality on you kids, but for the streaming catalog to grow as it needs to, the cost has got to go up sometime. Did you see what they had to pay for "Mad Men?" That's only one show, and one I'm not even that crazy about. How much do you think it will cost to get most of your favorite shows and mine? Mark my words. Either the price will go up or there will be a tiered subscription service sometime down the line.
Also, I can't imagine ISP's will continue indefinitely to carry all that streaming traffic on their backbones without either bandwidth caps for subscribers or extracting additional fees from Netflix. That's another cost that will eventually have to get passed on to us one way or another.
With Netflix licking it's public relations wounds, the next price increase is surely a lo-o-o-o-ong way off, which is a good thing for us consumers. I just hope Netflix doesn't run itself into the ground because it can't price itself reasonably in the face of pressure from ISP's and pressure from subscribers to not let the streaming library stagnate.
