“Some months back, in one of the lamer moves in corporate history, Netflix decided to charge a separate fee for streaming, meaning that you’d pay a roughly 60% price hike if you took both services,” Gene Steinberg writes for Tech Night Owl. “Now a price hike when the economy is in difficult straits is an awful idea, and that amount caught loyal Netflix customers by surprised. To make matters worse, Netflix planned to offload the media rentals to a second service, meaning you’d have to manage separate queues for each.”
“While Netflix management soon realized they had behaved badly and cancelled that foolish service separation scheme, the price hike was retained,” Steinberg writes. “Expenses are climbing, and they say they are stuck, but over the next quarter, some 800,000 customers jumped ship.”
Steinberg writes, “I’ve signed up for a 30-day free trial with Blockbuster. Over that period, I’ve added three movies to my rental queue that are still weeks away from being offered by Netflix. If Blockbuster delivers the goods in the same efficient fashion as Netflix, they will get my business. My Netflix account will be history, and, they will deserve to lose my business. No matter what the situation, when a company treats customers badly, they deserve to lose.”
Read more in the full article here.