September 21, 2011 - 9:43pm
WTF of the Week: Netflix's plan changes
BY DAVID TAO
Imagine that you have a beautiful, amazing, revolutionary product. It’s affordable, it offers the public what they need instantaneously and if they can’t find what they need, they can get it shipped pretty quickly. Your company, which you’ve taken public, has seen its stock soar to new highs. And of course, you’re about as universally loved as piles of adorable little kittens/puppies. So what do you next?
Well, if you’re Reed Hastings, and your company is Netflix, you morph from that nice old man down the street who’s always willing to lend you a cup of sugar into that crotchety old man down the street with the mean dog, who yells loudly about how he owns a very large gun and knows how to use it. Once you’ve established that you’re not some kind of criminal and just want to borrow some sugar, he’ll agree to sell you that cup for $7.99 a month. And if once in a while, you might need to borrow a cup of flour too, you’ll have to pay $15.98 a month.
In case you haven’t noticed/are really, really, really slow, the sugar is Netflix’s streaming plan and the flour is Netflix’s DVD plan. Of course, you’ll need the flour. You’ve always needed the flour. That’s because Netflix doesn’t have enough damn sugar. Seriously, the list of shows they don’t have for streaming (“Modern Family,” “The Good Wife,” “How I Met Your Mother,” “The Simpsons,” that’s right, the frickin’ Simpsons) is absolutely atrocious. Once in a while, you’ll need them to ship you something.
Upon realizing that his moves screwed the company, Hastings transformed yet again, from Clint Eastwood in “Gran Torino” to Michael Douglas in “Wall Street.” That is to say, he talked in that super charming way big shots with slicked back hair and suit suspenders do, telling us first and foremost that he “messed up.” Then he tells us that he’s going to separate the DVD rentals from streaming entirely, forcing us to not only pay more money, but also rate the same movies twice on both services. The internet, a place full of people who post things like goatse and believe that a Nigerian prince is really going to wire them $60 million, didn’t buy Hastings’s quasi-apology. Neither did investors, who sent Netflix stock even further into the dumpster.
Over the years, we’ve depended on Netflix for sugar and flour and other metaphorical terms for movies for sort of the same reason we’ve stuck with Facebook through each of their unnecessary changes (but that’s another rant for another time) – there wasn’t really an alternative. But in a world of iTunes and Hulu Plus and HBO GO and Amazon and even Blockbuster, which recently launched ads telling us all about why Netflix sucks, maybe its time to go to the grocery store and do some shopping.
