The end of Netflix?

I haven't been able to get into my Netflix account since Sunday night when I logged in and was greeted with the message that the price of my account was dropping by a $1. As this article explains, the systems have been down, the customer base is eroding, and the stock price is plunging.

This is mostly because of the direct competition from Blockbuster, a company I try to avoid at all costs. Technically, Blockbuster's online plan is "better" than Netflix. Not only can you get all the DVD's you want, but you can drop them off at your local Blockbuster store instead of mailing them back, giving you an extra day or two to receive an extra movie. When I signed up for Netflix, I thought it was great...until I started being "throttled" early on. Often times I've sent all the movies back, only to have to wait while Netflix holds off on sending me the next flicks in my queue. Couple that with the scores of films that I've wanted to rent only to be forced to "save" when, though released commercially already, Netflix gives a "release date unknown" flag.

I'm not planning on dumping Netflix for Blockbuster any time soon, but I think they've got some giant problems. It's obvious that Netflix has some business related problems right now. The fact that customers are leaving the service in droves is telling. It's one of two things: either people just want to pay less to go to Blockbuster, or the people leaving Netflix are people like me who watch a movie immediately and then toss it back in the mailbox. Netflix loses money on people like me. I've read that Blockbuster is much more forgiving about this group of customers and doesn't "throttle" like Netflix, but I can't be sure of that unless I actually tried out the service.

One thing Netflix could do to immediately satisfy its customers is to include the extra bonus discs on DVD's without having to use an extra slot to get them. It's annoying to have to use 2 of my 3 slots in order to get the extra disc of Street Trash for a few extras. It's like Netflix is charging me full-price and making me waste time for another movie in order to watch a couple featurettes. It's retarded. Shipping the bonus discs with the film would be a nice gesture to customers.

Netflix also has a program setup where you can view movies online without using up your queue slots. I was going to try this, until I realized that you have to download a program from the site (which doesn't work with Firefox, for me at least). I looked over the terms of agreement and it said something about how the program will take personal information off your computer and send it back to netflix. Eh, I'm just not in to doing something like that. I realize Netflix already has personal information and probably gathers even more based on the films I rent, but they don't need to have a program installed onto my computer to get more information. If they could set up something where a limited amount of movies each month could be viewed in a streaming fashion when you log in to the site, rather than have a program be installed on your pc, I think that would go a long way to making customers such as myself happy.

I'll stick with Netflix for now, but I do have misgivings. Hopefully they can figure out why they're getting pummeled by the evil empire that is Blockbuster before they go down in flames.