“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.
For a while I preferred Blockbuster since they offered multiple versions of movies, while cheap-ass Netflix would only stock the earliest version of a release (no remasters, no special editions). It’s true Blockbuster gets movies earlier, due to Netflix’s streaming deals, but ever since their money woes Blockbuster has been offering fewer movies and taking forever to ship the ones they do have. In short, the glory days of renting are over. Lower quality streaming, with no bonus features, has taken over.
I still keep the DVD by mail option so I can get the best movies. I also only make copies of the ones I like for the environmental reasons. What???? you say? Well, with my own personal DVD rip, I dont need to burn fossil fuels to have my favorite dvds delivered to my house a second time when I want to watch it again. Now that is being environmentally friendly 🙂