So you were paying $9.99 for streaming video and 2 DVD’s a month from Netflix. Now, you either have to choose between streaming and DVD or pay an additional $6.00 more to have the same package. Subscribers everywhere are angry and upset. They are either not buying into the Netflix Coup and just getting the streaming or DVD separately or jumping ship completely.
There are no real answers as to why Netflix has decided to make this shift. We feel that Netflix knew all along that they were going to make this shift, it just depended on when they would make it. How about the timing for Netflix? It happened when BlockBuster and Hollywood Video basically called it quits and Netflix’s market share grew exponentially overnight. Blockbuster hung in there for quite a while and still has some brick and mortar stores open, but the rest have vanished.
Then there’s Redbox or whatever it’s called with kiosks of DVD’s popping up mainly at supermarkets and 7 eleven’s. This choice is kind of a go between allowing the individual to go out that day and rent a DVD for $1. But don’t wait on returning it, you get charged $1 per day after the initial 24 hour rental period and you could end up paying $1million. jk.
Netflix said their changes were to accommodate subscribers who only wanted the DVD subscription. Blah! If that’s the case, why then punish the individuals that signed up initially for the $9.99 DVD and streaming contract? Huh? Why punish the people who helped create your market share? How best to keep your clients than just double their regular monthly fee? Do they think that the past DVD/streaming clients would be complacent and just click on the, “yes, I’d like to pay an additional $6 for what I was getting for $9!?” I hope not.
I hope that the entire population of Netflix users rebel and boycott this primal form of monopoly. Stay away from the theives that Netflix has created and move to a better, more reliable, more trustworthy service like… well, there is no other service to jump aboard except for the flailing Blockbuster store. I believe I saw one open the other day in a supermarket center in Woodland Hills, CA.
In another turn of frustration, how bad is Netflix’s website any ways. You can never really understand which movies are downloadable, you can never really understand or find which movies just came out, which ones had just become available, the site is extremely slow, and the navigation is just plain ridiculous.
They have 23 million subscribers. That’s $9.99 X 23 million = $229,770,000 per month. Why the hell are they now trying to extort (yes, extort) an additional $6 from anyone?? $229,770,000 per month X 12 = $2,757,240,000. $2.8 billion dollars a year and they still think they need to extort an additional $6 from people who were agreeable to paying $9.99?
It’s just a fantastic coup d’etat based on their leveraged monopoly power of the market share. Netflix does not want to ship DVD’s anymore. They just want to stream. And who wouldn’t. The costs differences between shipping and streaming are astronomical. Streaming costs are nothing compared to shipping costs. But what is Netflix to do now that the cell phone companies do not have unlimited data plans?
Another Coup and this one is big. Netflix and the local cell phone providers, notably, Verizon, have all been secretly meeting. Netflix stood up in the meeting and said, “we have a monopoly on the market share for streaming new and current media to our customers. You (cell phone providers) have the market share on data usage within your subscriber base. I suggest you change your packages to disallow unlimited data transfer to something more profitable (read, steal from the clients that have made your company). And in turn, if the clients should still want to have unlimited data, charge three times more and make sure you put a cap on their data usage. Oh, one more thing, the people that don’t have the unlimited data package, make sure you charge them an arm and leg if they go over their gigabyte of data for that month!” oh, and they said one more thing. “If you do this, we’d like 2% of your overall revenue or we won’t stream our media to your networks.”
Yep, Netflix is the new evil giant company that has a monopoly on the media in our world. What will happen now? Scan the internet for a few minutes and you will find sites that will offer you downloads of any type of media you want. These sites are obviously illegal, but traffic at these sites have been increasing ever since the Netflix announcements. People are outraged and now have made the decision that, “If Netflix and others are going to take advantage of me, I will just get the media through pirated sites and media services.”
Next up you’ll start to find that the studios, makers of the media, will create meetings with the media giants to again bring the prices back down to the normal levels, thereby adding value to the amount of money the Netflix and other’s clients are willing to spend to ensure (hopefully) that these media-watching people will not go to the dark side and download pirated media.
Good luck Netflix with your 23 million subscriber base. I wonder what that count is now? 20 million and dropping?