If it's too expensive to send me that many disks, fine, but don't lie to me about it.
I personally never ran into this -- I've never been more than a light-to-medium user, except in spikes. Like when I when I discovered 24 six years ago.
edit: Here's something straight from the horse's mouth:
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/...
"I stopped my subscription to your service because of your well-documented "throttling" of frequent renters. How can you say you are focused on customer service when you alienate your customers in this way? Bill Greenstein, Seattle
When we are short on new releases, which we try not to be, we believe it's fairest to allocate those new movies to subscribers who have not rented much recently. This upsets heavy users because they are not in the front of the line for new releases. We are straightforward about how it works, but not everyone likes that policy."
Eh, okay, assuming it begins and ends there, I can see the argument for doing things this way.
I was a heavy user who got movies sometimes the day after I returned the last one, which was great. Then I started getting them 3, 4, 5 days later.
They blamed USPS, even though no other mail to or from me was slow at all, so I started tracking the returned movies. They uniformly were delivered back to the warehouse just as quickly as before, but remained (via the netflix interface) unreturned for several days after that.
Normally I'd chalk that up to simple incompetence: they just weren't processing the movies very fast and/or their backend system was a piece of shit. I could buy that.
But I'd seen just how efficient they could be when they _wanted_ to be, ie before I passed the "heavy user" threshold, so I knew they were doing it deliberately.
I get the logic, I'm a heavy user, they can only send so many movies before I'm not profitable. But like I said before: don't lie to me about it.
I would've paid extra for a premium "heavy user" account if they had offered me the option, but instead they pretended USPS was magically slow JUST for netflix movies, and they permanently lost a customer.
Their loss.
That said, I'm not sure what the threshold was, because I was a very heavy user during that time and I never hit the problem. As such, whatever the threshold was, it was high.