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June 18, 2008

Why Does Netflix Hate their Customers?

Dawnise got a message from Netflix today saying that in September they'll be eliminating the profiles feature (launched in 2005) that's allowed me to independently maintain a queue of disks and rate movies (and get recommendations). There was no explanation offered, and they're not even going to merge the queues, or preserve them for reference - their advice is to "merge them" yourself or print them out.

This follows on the heels of their announcing that they'll charge customers extra to rent Blue Ray, despite the media costs being the same and having not done so for the duration of the HD war.

Despite having just purchased the Roku Netflix player, and being happy with it overall, I'm suddenly in the market for an alternative DVD rental service. I'm confident I can resell the Roku box, and if I can't, it was "only" $100 - which both made the decision to buy one easy, and made me willing to obsolete it over this blatant disregard for their customers.

At the very least, we'll be reducing our disks per month (currenty 4-at-a-time), and I'm going to look at Blockbuster's service.

We're not the only ones upset - the "blogosphere" (I hate that word) seems to have picked up the story and run with it.

I just submitted the following to Netflix:

Good Day;

Like many customers, I'm reacting to your announcement- received by my wife, the primary account holder - that you're eliminating the profiles feature in September.

Since your spokesperson has made it clear that the "decision is final", I wanted to make it clear that we will be reducing our monthly service level (and hence payment) in response to this reduced functionality.

We'll also be investigating alternative rental service providers. Should we find one offering a profiles feature, or even comparable service for less money, we'll be switching and canceling our service outright. The decision to eliminate this feature has forced me to pay most of the switching cost simply to preserve my queue - so for the first time since establishing a relationship with Netflix, I feel I've little to lose by closing our account.

Posted by dberger at June 18, 2008 9:20 PM