Netflix Fails
Netflix just informed me that it will no longer have account profiles. Profiles are a useful feature that let multiple people on one account have different queues. We also use them to separate “movie” and “series” queues, so that if we send back a disc of Lost, we get a new disc of Lost.
Profiles have most of the features of individual Netflix accounts. For example, a profile can have its own friends. Also, any rating done by a profile applies to that profile - people who are losing their profiles based on this change are losing possibly years of movie ratings that are supposed to be improving their recommendations.
They didn’t even provide a good explanation of why there are no longer profiles; they just said that the change will “help us continue to improve the Netflix website for all our customers.” That’s funny, because without any explanation, all this has done is make the Neflix website worse for me.
And while I was trying to complain about this, I just learned that Netflix no longer has customer support available by e-mail. For an Internet business, that is just disgraceful. If I wanted to have direct communication with a person, I could go to the video store. If I want to file a complaint or report a bug, I should be able to just e-mail customer support and not have to wait on hold or have a conversation.
If Blockbuster didn’t suck (mostly for not carrying unrated stuff like foreign films) then I would’ve switched already for this. On the other hand, maybe I just don’t need DVDs after all.
EDIT: Of course, I’m not the first to hear of this: Hacking Netflix has a much more interesting article about it.
1 Comment so far
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Your blog is interesting!
Keep up the good work!
By AlexM on 08.16.08 3:27 am
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