Honestly curious, where did those users go? Back to $40 shitcable? Torrenting?
I've long switched to itunes or Amazon when I want to watch movies because they tend to have the movie I want, when I want it, and I can download the whole movie before watching, thus not having to deal with netflix's lag-burdend craptastic streaming service.
As for his internet connection, that probably should be Netflix's concern. Most people aren't going to go through the hassle of changing their ISP for Netflix & it would be rather silly to expect him to continue paying for a service that doesn't work with his ISP or his viewing habits.
Netflix needs to be more aggressive with ISPs & content providers. They've seemingly rolled over time & again to ISPs & content producers while irritating their customer base.
So maybe I'm in the minority or maybe I'm not but I dropped netflix streaming and probably won't be going back unless cable or fiber internet comes to my area.
Being a network-geek, and having been really bored one weekend, I took my macbook pro, and my girlfriend's macbook air (both of which have this problem) to a cage at equinix that I'd built out for a customer a few years ago. That network is equipped with a pair of cisco 6509's with sup2-msfc2s (old gear, but perfectly adequate for the task at hand). Each router has 3x 1gb uplinks to different providers (internap, time warner, and level3) running BGP. All of three ISP's peer directly with Netflix's AS. The problems persisted whether I was behind my routing, or statically routing by grabbing an IP on the /29 stub network each provider gives me to establish the bgp connection).
I tested both from behind my routing, and for fun, from my testing subnets (the stub networks) which statically route through their respective uplinks. Plenty of bandwidth, no mid-level ISP to insert QoS wankery. Same problems.
As for owning the movie, did that even come up in my previous comment? If so, then forgive me, it's not something I care about. In the rare instance (3-4x per month) where I want to watch a movie, I just want it to work. I don't want it to pause every few minutes to see a "buffering" screen. That's three steps backwards.
The commonality between both laptops is that they run os x( one on snow leopard, one on lion). I suspect silverlight is the real culprit, but I don't care. The solution would be to allow customers to buffer large chunks of the movie (20-30%) or download the whole movie before playing. Instead Netflix (probably due to being hamstrung by their agreements with content providers) tries to be too clever with variable bit-rate encoding and ruins the viewing experience. (even one pause is unacceptable in my book, let alone the 5-10 I often had per movie).
Whenever I discuss this with others, some people have similar quality problems, some people claim it works perfectly making me wonder if it's platform specific. Out of curiosity, are you running Mac, Windows, or Linux?
Also, the silverlight client has ridiculously bad volume control, I never quite understood why that is.
That said, I'll probably cancel because there's nothing I want to watch anymore.
Contrary to the way people seem to act, entertainment is neither a right, or a requirement. I get by just fine without movies or television shows.
I ride more, play board games, and read more.
Essentially, I figured out that it was costing me $16/movie I watched, and that was before the price hike. So I cut it out, and given that I was watching on average, a movie every 2 months, I haven't noticed the difference. (and what's more, that's an average, and there was much more activity in a couple of bursts early one.)
Their big error for me was reminding me of the relationship between the monthly billing and how much I got out of it.
FWIW, this is the second time I've cancelled netflix. They'll probably get a third chance, if I ever feel like watching movies again.
I just use hulu.com and other similar sites; Mac Mini connected to my TV.
It's not the same user experience as a TV, but for me it's better. It allows me to watch/listen to shows/movies in one tab while reading articles, instant messaging friends & other things within other tabs.
Paradoxically, the unlimited movie buffet might be their undoing. There is a limited number of movies that are truly excellent and worth watching. Once you go through those good ones, you're left with the crap. Having unlimited watching quickly moves you from the good stuff to the crap, and then you cancel your subscription. Neflix faces a scarcity disconnect: its unlimited model says there is no scarcity but out in the real world good movies are still scarce.
Maybe there's a ton of stuff that I don't "need" to watch, but I can always find something interesting. I really don't consider myself a huge movie lover either.
I watch about 2-3 movies and 2 TV shows a week though so it does take me a while to get through my queue.
RedBox for Blu-Ray.
Netflix made the catastrophic mistake of reminding their customers how much they were paying for their service at the exact time new content was back on television ... then did it again a couple weeks later. They couldn't have executed any worse IMO.
In my case, it was so rare that I got DVDs that it wasn't worth the cost of continuing that. I've just dropped rented DVDs from my viewing all together (though there's also a Redbox that I go by every single day so that's an option).
As for streaming, most of what I want to watch I can also get for free via Amazon Instant with my Amazon Prime account, which I would be paying for anyway and the occasional movie or show that isn't included free evens out to no more than I was paying for Netflix.
I also realized that I would watch a lot of TV shows on Netflix and then buy them on DVD/blu-ray at a later date, so I just buy the DVDs/blu-rays, which requires a little more patience (box sets are expensive so I don't buy them everyday) but it turns out that waiting a month or two has no significant impact on my life. ;)
Shows that are currently airing, some documentaries, kids movies, etc. we watch on Hulu for free. They only offer the last 5 episodes of the season on the free account, but if you don't get behind, that's all you need.
Besides, I like having the physical media, even though it's not the most efficient, and I don't think I'm alone in that. I think it probably appeals to a lot of consumers.
Anyway, it doesn't really matter if they become obsolete in a year. The ones I've purchased aren't going to suddenly stop working because the technology has moved on and the players will be around for a long while for this reason. Heck, you can still buy a VCR for about $40 and VHS tapes have a much shorter life than a CD. When the players start getting hard to find or too expensive, it will be a simple matter to transfer the contents of said disks to a hard drive.
I can get a lot from my library. While I don't get to always choose the timing for inter-library loans, I can get a season of television for two weeks at a time. With Netflix, I just get individual DVDs.
Some of the things I want to watch are already online for streaming like South Park. There's a lot of content on Hulu as well and network sites can be overlooked as sources of content.
I think the price hike made a lot of people think about how they used Netflix. When it was a combined service, people thought "oh, I'm getting this interesting combined service" and ended there. Now people are seeing $16/mo for 3-DVDs at a time and wondering. In order to get to the $1/DVD level, you'd have to get 4 per week. I think a lot of people didn't have that high a velocity of DVDs. You get one shipped to you on monday, it arrives tuesday, I find that there's usually at least 2-3 days of it being at my house between finding the time to watch it and forgetting it in the morning, it gets into the post on thursday or friday, gets to Netflix friday or saturday, and basically you've got a week turn-around time. And if you're getting multiple out at a time, it's hard to watch that much content - and watch it consistently month-to-month. Likewise, I think that people ran through a lot of the streaming content. I also think that the on-demand streaming just doesn't allow me to find things well. It keeps showing me the stuff I've already seen and things it thinks I'm going to rate as 2-3 stars. I understand that Netflix went to this less-search, more-browsing interface because their streaming catalogue isn't complete, but it keeps showing me things I don't want to watch and on rare occasions I've had friends tell me about things I didn't know were on there.
So, I think people have been taking stock of Netflix. Netflix raised their prices a mere 9 months prior on them and then again. 3 DVDs plus streaming went from $17 to $20 at the start of 2011 and then from $20 to $24 at the end of summer 2011. For me, there's a genuine feeling that these price increases might continue. I mean, if Netflix goes up another 40% over the next year, that's getting pretty close to "$40 shitcable". Likewise, I surveyed my other options and found them better. I can get a whole season of TV at a time from my library for two weeks. No worrying about how quickly I get disks back into the mail or being annoyed by not having the next disk. New releases I can get from kiosks the night I want them and drop them off on my way to work the next morning and only pay $1. A decent amount of programming is streamable online. Maybe that isn't for you. It's working nicely for me.
I have no hard feelings for Netflix, but I find this works better for me while being cheaper. Their streaming collection held my interest for a while and then began seeming like the re-runs of shows in the 6-8pm time slot - sure, they could be good shows, but they weren't necessarily what you were looking for. For me, Netflix solved the problem of rental stores charging me $5 for a DVD. For basically that price, I could get 3-DVDs at a time. Now I'm finding that I can get a $1 DVD from a kiosk (and can often get coupons for those machines) and grab it when I want on my way home. My library can provide me with deeper selection and it costs me nothing (I have to pay the taxes whether I use it or not) and I don't feel as on-the-clock as I do with Netflix. If I return one I didn't watch, well, I can get it again some other time and haven't lost anything - which isn't the feeling I get from Netflix.
I'm not saying they're a bad service or it shouldn't work for you. I just think there's increase competition from cheap, kiosk-based rentals and that people have been taking stock of how they use their Netflix and finding it a bit lacking. I mean, if you've kept the same DVDs home for a month and haven't watched them, that isn't Netflix's fault, but it does mean that you aren't enjoying a lot of value there. A price increase simply brings that to your attention and makes you think about eliminating it from your expenses.
Is Netflix so at the whims of content providers that their model is so much different? It seems like a completely broken business if they can't find scalable ways to make their content providers money.
Netflix doesn't do that, though. There are no channels to speak of, so there is no middleman to negotiate with, there is only the content providers who see you as small peanuts when you're little and a looming, direct threat when you're big.
The way Netflix deals work (at least from what we can gather from public articles about the subject) is that Netflix pays a fixed cost for x streams of y content from z provider, with a time expiry for the overall deal. Once the collective user base has used up that streaming bucket or the time has expired, Netflix has to re-negotiate to fill it again.
In other words, in 2005 when Netflix only has 500k subscribers and online video is impossible to monitize, handing them a multi year exclusive deal with a 5 million streams for $100 million (pulling these numbers directly out of my ass, just to be clear) is no big deal, you just made $100 million on something that was formerly worthless, good for you.
However now it's the year 2011 when advertisers are paying better money for online ads, online viewing is exploding and eating into your traditional sources of revenue, and Netflix is riding their 2005-era deal all the way to the bank. Now letting them get away with that deal is viewed as tantamount to content theft in the eyes of the providers. Suddenly to secure the same deal you got for $100m, will now cost you $500m. Multiply that by every content provider in the industry, and you can plainly see why Netflix is stuck between a rock and a hard place right now.