Needless to say there has been a lot of anger and backlash as a result of this announcement. Simply Google "Netflix" and you will be rewarded with pages and pages of articles about the announcement and its less-than-friendly reception. Netflix' Facebook announcement of their plan change has drawn more than 38,000 comments, mostly negative, and they are still rolling in. There are also lots of comments indicating that whoever is running their Facebook page has been deleting comments, so who knows how many comments have actually been made? Many Facebook pages have been created that encourage Netflix customers to boycott, protest, cancel their plans, etc.
We're not happy about it in this household either, so here, in letter form, I give you my thoughts...
Dear Netflix,
We received the email informing us of your intentions to split the DVD and streaming video into two separate plans with new charges for each, and like so many customers we are not happy and will, more than likely, be canceling our service as a result. In your blog announcement you claim that you "are offering your lowest prices ever", yet our monthly bill would increase from $9.99 to $15.98 for the same service - this is not a lower price. The only people who will be paying less will be those who had ONLY DVD service and those who had ONLY streaming service, but I assume most of your customers have the combined plan that we currently have.
You also say that "[your] members now have a choice: a streaming only plan, a DVD only plan, or both." You present this as though it is a positive, but I already had the choice between streaming or DVDs under my combined plan. Were we to continue our service we would not keep both options, and the neither individual plan has enough appeal without the other. And you forgot to mention the 4th option: completely ending business with Netflix.
In any given month we might receive 8 DVDs with the DVD only plan because of the mail turn around time. For that same $8 we can simply go to the nearest RedBox, know that we will get 8 movies for our $8, and have our disk instantly instead of waiting 2-3 days for a new Netflix disk to arrive in the mail. If our RedBox disk doesn't work we will get codes for 2 free rentals, one for the disk that didn't work, another for the trouble. What do we get from Netflix for a non-working disk besides more waiting?
We would love to just downgrade to streaming video so that we can watch instantly, but the selection with streaming video alone isn't good enough in our opinion. Rarely are any newer, worthwhile titles made available, and I am surprised by how many older movies and shows are only available on DVD. Many speculate that your intentions are to use this new plan to "force" customers into the streaming only plan so that you can save costs on shipping and in the warehouse. On the Netflix blog you seem to be surprised that "there is still a very large continuing demand for DVDs." I'm not sure how you couldn't have predicted this with so many titles only available on DVD.
I am not one to criticize without offering some ideas as alternatives, so here goes:
1) Continue the combined plan as is (or even just adding a dollar or two - we'd keep our plan if the price difference was small) while working to increase the streaming video selection. Many customers will be selecting only 1 option, and you will be losing $2.00 every month for each customer who does this. Increasing streaming availability will decrease the number of DVDs you will have to mail, and you will have that extra $2.00 a month per member to work with. Then, if you wanted to, you could begin phasing out DVDs as streaming availability becomes better.
2) Charge the full $7.99 for the first option, but only half of that for each additional option that a customer chooses. Insurance companies, cable/internet companies, etc offer discounts when more than 1 service is purchased, it's a good business practice.
I'm sure that there are other options that would be more customer-friendly and work for your business too. I hope that in the near future we will see either a complete withdrawal of this new plan, a reduction in price for the new plan for use of both streaming video and DVDs, or (and this would be best for us) a much better streaming video selection, but we're not going to continue paying you monthly while waiting for the streaming selection to improve. We would love to continue to do business with you, but we will not if plans proceed as currently anticipated.
Sincerely,
Yours Truly
We had the 3 out and streaming plan last year (we don't have cable) and in Oct/Nov they raised the price so we changed from 3 out & streaming (which was 16.99 then - I can't recall what they were changing it to and you can't access it on their site). When we changed, we opted for 2 out and streaming for $14.99. They're upping our price again, it will be $19.98 with the new plans. We'll be switching to 1 out at a time. But next price hike? We're gone. But seriously - 2 HUGE price increases in 9 months? Who does that?
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