A while ago, the price of my Netflix account sky-rocketed. I suppose this wouldn’t have been so bad if I had received a heads up about it, or if they hadn’t doubled the price on me for the same service I had already been receiving. This was upsetting, and I almost canceled my account.
A few weeks later, the CEO of Netflix made a formal apology -this was caused by a decrease in sales which lead to a delay on his diamond studded swimming pool- and assured people that he intended to only kind of screw them and that this price change SHOULD have been announced. He then went on to mention his new company, Qwikster.
Qwikster was interesting, but now it’s getting canned because it sunk faster than the Titanic. This isn’t necessarily shocking, but it makes me wonder why Netflix didn’t realize this was a bad idea in the first place.
For those of you who are having a hard time following what happened, I’ll explain in a step-by-step fashion.
1. Netflix gets launched and after a while offers DVDs as well as online streaming for ten dollars a month.
2. Blockbuster goes bankrupt (and gets bought by Dish)
3. Netflix jacks up prices because their only competition is up shite stream without a paddle.
4. People get angry.
5. Reed Hastings realizes Americans aren’t as stupid as My Name Is Earl (which was on his queue) made them out to be and makes a formal apology.
6. Around the same time, Qwikster is launched.
7. A week after Qwikster’s launch, it gets canned faster than the Dreamcast did after people realized its games were in a CD-ROM format.
8. I’m now paying 10 dollars a month to watch terrible shows on Netflix, and another 8 dollars a month to get movies delivered to me (this has been the case since step 3).
Nothing has changed. This whole Qwikster thing was nothing more than a bad diversion to make people less angry about Netflix trying to take advantage of them. Either way, it’s gone, and so is this customer.