I have had on and off affair with Netflix for sometime now. A week or so I decided again that it was no longer time to be a member of netflix. Sure the service has a lot of great features but for me, I am no longer a member.
When I first joined Netflix they seemed to have everything....you could add friends and get recommendations from them. I really enjoyed this feature the most because my friends could tell me what they liked and I could easily add them to my future watching lists. Without any notification (at least to me and all my friends) they slowly dismantled the feature. Soon it became really hard to find out how to recommend films, then all my friends on my list just disappeared, then the entire feature was gone with no mention to me of any kind.
Soon new releases wouldn't be available right when they came out. Big studios wanted you to actually buy the DVD's and they decided netflix would have to wait a while to get their hands on the new releases. The wait for some studios new movies is very long (28 days for Warner Bros.). Ok I could somewhat live with that, I would just make sure to put the newer releases on the back burner for a while longer.
What really upset me takes a while to get too. See I was a member of netflix and all of the sudden they offered instant streaming for free, absolutely no additional cost to me. I could use or not use the feature and not pay anything more, I never signed up for anything asking me if I didn't want to use the feature so I thought it was a great little extra to what I already had. Then most recently they decided to charge for the instant streaming. Excuse me, I never asked for this in the first place so why are you charging me for this now? So now you have the choice to pay for instant streaming or just pay for the dvd's (or blurays for an additional cost). I was pretty upset about this, sure they lowered the cost of the DVD's to make up somewhat for the loss. I guess the whole time they were offering the instant streaming to get you hooked and then say, oh sorry...you will now pay us for this because you are used to it. I was pretty upset, but still decided to stick with the program because they had a lot of movies I wanted to see.
The main reasons I am leaving this time is because I am finding that I can rent a lot of the same movies they have at the library I work at. Working for the library has its perks, we have lately been getting all the new DVD's and now blurays the day after they are released. I was noticing the movies I rented from netflix would show up at the library a few days after I watched them. I just finally decided that I would be giving up netflix yet again because I can get the new releases from the library.
The instant watch feature is also being reduced in many ways. Starz movies on netflix are going to soon be gone as well, at the end of this month Starz is planning to not renew its contact with netflix instant watch. My fiance has decided to keep her instant watch, for now. I can tell you it is a good service if used to watch past seasons of TV shows. They have seemed to step up with the new TV shows but lost focus on the movies. I think the feature would be lowering its costs to stay worth the price.
If you love netflix I can honestly say I was there once. They offer some great movies and some off titles you will not find at most places (including the library). They are also lacking many titles, do not let you get your hands on new movies without a wait (then you have to wait again for the high demand to go down), don't mind that they charge for a once free service that they included (no one made them do that!). I might come back to netflix, but not anytime soon.
2 comments:
I had an on and off again relationship with Netflix even before streaming was in the picture(Pun intended). Definitely cool that you could get your hands on the movies at the library - and I'm sure a lot of people don't know that you can get movies there. Heck, it has been almost two years living in Santa Clara and I haven't even visited the library.
I used to join Netflix when it was the offseason for baseball...not sure if I'll do that again or not.
I feel the same way. It's great to have when they add new content to the streaming, but after a couple months everything becomes stale and boring so I cancel my membership only to rejoin six months later in hopes that there is some better content. I never did use the DVD's in the mail for very long...I just couldn't plan ahead! Too bad Netflix couldn't negotiate some better contracts with the studios.
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