OK, I don’t personally use Netflix, but I’ve heard the hoopla and buzz surrounding how simple and easy their service is to use. I was, therefore, surprised when I heard that they were going to eliminate individual user profiles “for simplicity’s sake”. User profiles, from what I understand, allow accounts with “multiple DVD check-out” privileges to allow individual users to specify what DVDs they want next, up to as many as the host account allows. Therefore, a family could maintain separate queues for action movies (Oorah?), romance movies (Nick Sparks), and kids movies (Anything Pixar…).
Apparently they realized, with the help of the adamant NetFlix community, that this would be a friggin’ stupid move.
The setup in place right now strikes me as extremely convenient for families, social Netflix browsing, and each person’s individual movie reviews and recommendations. So, when they announced that the service would be cancelled on August 30th, 2008, I heard about it nearly everywhere. Now, with Netflix in possession of over 6.8 million users at the end of 2007 and 8.6 million users at the end of this month (see Netflix Snapshot numbers), alienating even a tenth of that would result in a lot of disappointed people. In contrast, Blockbuster’s competing video rental service had only 2.8 million paying customers (3.0 million total subscribers), so Netflix is clearly the top dog right now.
However, in response to the customer outcry (it’s impossible to get a direct number, but the Netflix Community Blog post announcing the profile terminations had well over 1000 comments…) Netflix announced yesterday that it was keeping user profiles with this post on the Netflix Community Blog. Two things: It’s refreshing that a company listened to the overwhelming consumer voice and rescinded what would have been an overall fiscally-bad decision, and I’m left wondering how this idea ever made it out of the development labs!
To make a long story short, if you have a Netflix subscription:
1) If you haven’t heard of Profiles, check them out. After this fiasco, they will be around for a while;
2) Stop consolidating your information, if you have utilized Profiles and wished to keep your data around;
and 3) Let Netflix know this is the right decision (at least from what I’ve seen).
Pictures courtesty of: Netflix;
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