One of the best and worst things about Twitter is that it gives you people's immediate and unfiltered reaction to just about anything. Sometimes, like when we found out bin Laden was dead, or the Women's World Cup team beat Brazil, it's great. Last week, when Netflix announced it was going to raise its subscription fees, it was not great. I've never seen a bigger collection of crybabies. People were threatening to cancel subscriptions, the company was being called things usually reserved for Bank of America and BP, and the Huffington Post quickly whipped up a feature that listed alternatives for anyone thinking about leaving Netflix.
You know what? Go ahead. Quit. Please. There's really no reason why there should be long waits for movies like Battle: Los Angeles or Red Riding Hood, but there are. Maybe with fewer of you, it won't take as long for me to receive two movies that have a combined Rotten Tomatoes rating of 46%. I've also noticed that sometimes the quality of streamed movies isn't as good as it probably should be. I can't say for certain that it's because so many Netflix users are clogging up the internet and slowing my movie down, but hey, it seems plausible.
We live in a culture where it's possible to get a ridiculous amount of content online cheaply, if not for free. iTunes put CD stores out of business. Amazon sells books at 40% off. Hulu claims to have been charging for its premium service for a year now, but I can still access pretty much everything I want to see for free, so I'm not sure what's going on there. And through the wonder of BitTorrent, you can find virtually anything you're looking for at no cost at all.
So the complete meltdown following Netflix's announcement; the sheer indignation at actually being asked to pay a higher--albeit, still extraordinarily fair--price for something great, was too much for me to take. From the online reaction, you'd think Netflix was going to start charging testicles.
I'm on the 3 DVDs at-a-time/streaming plan. As of September, that'll increase to $23.98. Honestly, I couldn't even tell you what I've been paying. Since it's been years since I signed up for Netflix and because I'm one of those fiscally irresponsible people who never really examines their monthly credit card statement and just takes it on faith that no one would want to steal their identity, my reaction was basically, "Wait, you mean Netflix doesn't already cost $23.98 a month?"
Let's break that $23.98 down. I'd say I get approximately 15 DVDs a month from Netflix. (Although I don't actually watch all of them. I tend to have a lot of low-budget horror movies in my queue, so I'll often pop one in and decide after two minutes that it's too shitty even for me. Seriously, how can a movie with a brilliant title like Cheerleader Autopsy be so bad?) That means I'll be paying $1.60 per rental. In a world of $9.50 matinees at a theater, that seems like a steal. And guess what? If I have a particularly slothful month, where I'm doing little more than watching and returning movies, that means I'm paying even less! So if I get fired tomorrow and spend a depressed month on my couch, I'd probably increase to something like 25 DVDs a month. Then I'm just paying 96 cents per film! At that price, it almost seems irresponsible to even have a job and/or ever leave your couch!
And of course, that's not even counting streaming. I don't stream a lot of stuff, just because whenever I get a sudden urge to watch a particular movie and check to see if it's available for streaming, the answer is almost always no. But it's a nice feature to have access to. After watching a fair amount of the World Series of Poker on Saturday, I was in a Vegas mood, so I went out on my balcony and watched Casino on my laptop, fantasizing about what Sam and Nicky would do to some of the douchier-looking players in the WSOP if they'd tried wandering into the Tangiers wearing hoodies and mirrored sunglasses and lecturing about EV or pot equity. Broken fingers all around, probably.
But you know why I really can't get upset over the Netflix rate increase? Why, even if they'd announced they were going to start charging $30 or $40 a month, I wouldn't leave? Because I still remember Blockbuster. Do you? You know, Blockbuster Video? Lousy movie selection? Two-day rentals? Late fees? Being ready to go to bed before suddenly remembering that you hadn't returned the movies you had checked out, so you'd have to jump in the car and get to the store before midnight?
At the time, we blindly accepted this, because we couldn't imagine any alternative. It wasn't until Netflix started doing to Blockbuster what Blockbuster had so gleefully done to hundreds of independent video stores over the years, that we realized exorbitant late fees and unreasonably short rental periods actually weren't a necessary evil of the video rental business. All of a sudden, Blockbuster tried making up for years of customer abuse. No more late fees. Five-day rentals. More copies of new releases. But it was too late, and the company's currently circling the drain. You always hate to see people lose their jobs, but is anyone going to be sorry the day the last Blockbuster gets shuttered?
If I'd rented 15 DVDs a month from Blockbuster, the total cost would have been upwards of $75. Additionally, that cost prevented people from experimenting too much. The only reason I can rent a movie called Cheerleader Autopsy that I know has a 99% chance of sucking, is because I know that if it does, it goes right back into the mail, and the only thing it's cost me is a slight delay in seeing the next movie in my queue. Remember browsing through the shelves and finding a movie you'd never heard of before that looked like it might be good, but not being able to bring yourself to take the risk? Or getting it and hating it, but feeling like you had to stick with it to get your money's worth? Two things we'll never have to go through again.
So stay with Netflix, leave, switch to a different plan, whatever. But don't for one second pretend the service isn't worth every penny you're paying for it. Not when we were paying so much more for so much less just a few years ago.
You know what? Go ahead. Quit. Please. There's really no reason why there should be long waits for movies like Battle: Los Angeles or Red Riding Hood, but there are. Maybe with fewer of you, it won't take as long for me to receive two movies that have a combined Rotten Tomatoes rating of 46%. I've also noticed that sometimes the quality of streamed movies isn't as good as it probably should be. I can't say for certain that it's because so many Netflix users are clogging up the internet and slowing my movie down, but hey, it seems plausible.
We live in a culture where it's possible to get a ridiculous amount of content online cheaply, if not for free. iTunes put CD stores out of business. Amazon sells books at 40% off. Hulu claims to have been charging for its premium service for a year now, but I can still access pretty much everything I want to see for free, so I'm not sure what's going on there. And through the wonder of BitTorrent, you can find virtually anything you're looking for at no cost at all.
So the complete meltdown following Netflix's announcement; the sheer indignation at actually being asked to pay a higher--albeit, still extraordinarily fair--price for something great, was too much for me to take. From the online reaction, you'd think Netflix was going to start charging testicles.
I'm on the 3 DVDs at-a-time/streaming plan. As of September, that'll increase to $23.98. Honestly, I couldn't even tell you what I've been paying. Since it's been years since I signed up for Netflix and because I'm one of those fiscally irresponsible people who never really examines their monthly credit card statement and just takes it on faith that no one would want to steal their identity, my reaction was basically, "Wait, you mean Netflix doesn't already cost $23.98 a month?"
Let's break that $23.98 down. I'd say I get approximately 15 DVDs a month from Netflix. (Although I don't actually watch all of them. I tend to have a lot of low-budget horror movies in my queue, so I'll often pop one in and decide after two minutes that it's too shitty even for me. Seriously, how can a movie with a brilliant title like Cheerleader Autopsy be so bad?) That means I'll be paying $1.60 per rental. In a world of $9.50 matinees at a theater, that seems like a steal. And guess what? If I have a particularly slothful month, where I'm doing little more than watching and returning movies, that means I'm paying even less! So if I get fired tomorrow and spend a depressed month on my couch, I'd probably increase to something like 25 DVDs a month. Then I'm just paying 96 cents per film! At that price, it almost seems irresponsible to even have a job and/or ever leave your couch!
And of course, that's not even counting streaming. I don't stream a lot of stuff, just because whenever I get a sudden urge to watch a particular movie and check to see if it's available for streaming, the answer is almost always no. But it's a nice feature to have access to. After watching a fair amount of the World Series of Poker on Saturday, I was in a Vegas mood, so I went out on my balcony and watched Casino on my laptop, fantasizing about what Sam and Nicky would do to some of the douchier-looking players in the WSOP if they'd tried wandering into the Tangiers wearing hoodies and mirrored sunglasses and lecturing about EV or pot equity. Broken fingers all around, probably.
But you know why I really can't get upset over the Netflix rate increase? Why, even if they'd announced they were going to start charging $30 or $40 a month, I wouldn't leave? Because I still remember Blockbuster. Do you? You know, Blockbuster Video? Lousy movie selection? Two-day rentals? Late fees? Being ready to go to bed before suddenly remembering that you hadn't returned the movies you had checked out, so you'd have to jump in the car and get to the store before midnight?
At the time, we blindly accepted this, because we couldn't imagine any alternative. It wasn't until Netflix started doing to Blockbuster what Blockbuster had so gleefully done to hundreds of independent video stores over the years, that we realized exorbitant late fees and unreasonably short rental periods actually weren't a necessary evil of the video rental business. All of a sudden, Blockbuster tried making up for years of customer abuse. No more late fees. Five-day rentals. More copies of new releases. But it was too late, and the company's currently circling the drain. You always hate to see people lose their jobs, but is anyone going to be sorry the day the last Blockbuster gets shuttered?
If I'd rented 15 DVDs a month from Blockbuster, the total cost would have been upwards of $75. Additionally, that cost prevented people from experimenting too much. The only reason I can rent a movie called Cheerleader Autopsy that I know has a 99% chance of sucking, is because I know that if it does, it goes right back into the mail, and the only thing it's cost me is a slight delay in seeing the next movie in my queue. Remember browsing through the shelves and finding a movie you'd never heard of before that looked like it might be good, but not being able to bring yourself to take the risk? Or getting it and hating it, but feeling like you had to stick with it to get your money's worth? Two things we'll never have to go through again.
So stay with Netflix, leave, switch to a different plan, whatever. But don't for one second pretend the service isn't worth every penny you're paying for it. Not when we were paying so much more for so much less just a few years ago.
2 comments:
AMEN!
I love this.
I barely remember what I pay per month and if it goes up? That's fair because we use Netflix all the time! Especially now that we can stream right to the TV.
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