Why I’m Sticking with Netflix
Posted: Friday, July 15, 2011
by Terry Mitchell
http://commenterry.blogs.com
In the wake of the recent rate increase by Netflix, many of its customers became angry and have either cancelled or threatened to cancel their subscriptions. However, I’m not one of them. I’m sticking with Netflix, as it is still the best movie rental service known to man.
Besides, people should not be blaming Netflix for the price increase. Instead, they should be blaming the greedy movie studios. Some of these studios suddenly and exponentially increased the price Netflix has to pay for streaming their movies. Netflix is a for-profit company, not a charity. They could not eat these price hikes and remain profitable. Actually, it’s a wonder that Netflix didn’t have to end up charging even more.
I think they handled their rate increase in the best possible way. They could have just kept their subscriptions for mail-order and streaming bundled together and just increased the price for them, which would have affected all of their subscribers. Fortunately, that’s not what they did. Instead, they separated them out so that those who only wanted mail-order or streaming could select one or the other and continue their monthly subscription without an increase. Only those who wanted to continue doing both will see an increase. I believe most of their subscribers are in the former category.
I originally subscribed to Netflix for their mail-order DVDs and that’s why I continue to subscribe. The streaming capability was added to my subscription later as a bonus, but I rarely used it. I believe that this is also the preference of a large portion of their subscriber base. On the other hand, there are probably plenty of Netflix subscribers who are no longer interested in mail-order rentals and are content with streaming only.
Also, none of the alternatives to Netflix would work for me. Blockbuster Online has nearly as good of a selection, but when I tried it before, it was way too slow in delivering my movies. And Redbox is a joke. It doesn’t offer movies by mail and those tiny kiosks can only carry a small fraction of the titles available through Netflix. It might be a good choice for those who are only interested in the most popular movies, but I’m afraid those of us who like the more obscure stuff would find ourselves having to visit kiosk after kiosk looking for what we want.
My cable company does offer movies-on-demand but access to most of them requires expensive subscriptions to the various premium movie channels. Even with subscriptions to all of them, the selection of titles wouldn’t come close to what Netflix offers. And don’t talk to me about online streaming services such as Hulu. I’m much too impatient for that kind of thing. I can’t tolerate the notion of having to set aside a whole 90 minutes to watch a 90-minute movie. I demand the ability to use the fast-forward button so I can watch it on 30 minutes!
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Top-level comments on this article: (1 total)Good information Sir!Thank you, I'm glad you liked it.
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