Netflix (DVD Delivery Discussion Only)

[Perkins Cobb]

Right, but, both discs I have out have a big button under them that I can use to make the purchase -- that's new. Plus they sent me an e-mail today pushing the purchase of discs I've rented. Hopefully I'm being paranoid in thinking it's a going-out-of-business sale though.

Meanwhile, I've pushed a couple of OOP discs that go for over $20 on Amazon to the top of my queue, to see if they give me a shot at buying 'em cheap.

[jwd5275]

I can only pray that it is still only for in print titles.

[PillowRock]

Netflix will be doing about 60% as much work. (This is true at least for people that regularly return their discs. Each 1-at-a-time disc in my plan presently gets me a disc every 3 mail days. Under the new plan, it would be one every 5 mail days. 3/5 = 60%.)

My bet is that the *majority* of customers do not routinely watch and mail back their movies in a day, as that assumes. (It wouldn't surprise me if there were a fair number of people who only actually watched and "turned around" one or two movies per month.) So the break even price reduction for Netfilx would be much less than your numbers would suggest.

[Cosmic Bus]

Hopefully I'm wrong, but it appears that there is no way to gift someone a DVD subscription now, only streaming subscriptions. Thought it might be because my account is only set up for streaming, but it explicitly states "does not include DVDs by mail" even when I go to the gift page after logging out. Very annoying.

[swo17]

I'm on a DVD-only plan and it doesn't allow me to gift a DVD subscription either. Not that I hate anyone enough to wish a Netflix membership on them, but still

[Cosmic Bus]

Alright, just spoke to someone in customer service and was told it's an error ("...confusingly worded" uh-huh.) on the site and that the person you send the gift to will be able to choose a DVD plan when they activate the code or apply it to an existing account despite the terms saying the exact opposite when you're trying to purchase it. She said people have been calling all day about this, so hopefully they have the sense to correct the listing.

[zedz]

It's a completely inadvertent error that just happens to coincide precisely with the company's obnoxious (barely) hidden agenda!

[Perkins Cobb]

Well, that's similar to when I cancelled my plan and restarted it -- initially, they only appear to offer streaming and 1-DVD plans. Only after you actually sign up for the latter do you observe, if you bother to investigate, that you can bump it up as far as 8. But it's only a matter of time before they take away the higher disc plans. Blockbuster used to offer a 4 out plan, then went down to 3, and then the last time I restarted my account, the max appeared to be 2, unless I was missing something.

[Perkins Cobb]

Another sign of the apocalypse: even though a Netflix gift subscription can still be redeemed for any plan (including discs), the Netflix website tries to make it sound like you can only give streaming. Nice one, Reed.

[TMDaines]

Another sign of the apocalypse: even though a Netflix gift subscription can still be redeemed for any plan (including discs), the Netflix website tries to make it sound like you can only give streaming. Nice one, Reed.

Read a few posts up.

[Perkins Cobb]

Oh. So THAT'S what we were talking about!

[duck duck]

Don't know if anyone pointed it out but they are now streaming all of the "7 UP" films. Before all they had was the most recent two and I didn't understand the point of that.

[mfunk9786]

That's great news, thanks for the heads-up. Time to finally watch these.

[flyonthewall2983]

Is anyone else having trouble accessing the site?

[Drucker]

I only check the email that I use to login to netflix weekly, but I noticed they offered me a free bonus DVD rental. If anyone else didn't notice, be sure to check your inbox!

[Perkins Cobb]

Is anyone else having trouble accessing the site?

It's OK for me at the moment. If there's a major outage hackingnetflix.com will probably have details, and I think Netflix itself has a blog for stuff like that, which I never check because, y'know, eff them.

[Professor Wagstaff]

That's great news, thanks for the heads-up. Time to finally watch these.

Perfect timing as I just mentioned to some folks earlier this week how wonderful these are. I marathoned the series over the week of Christmas about three years ago. It's emotionally overwhelming in the best way possible. Good to catch up since 56 Up should be out in 2012 or 2013.

[swo17]

Is anyone else having trouble accessing the site?

Netflix hasn't been working for me for the last year and a half. Is anyone else experiencing this problem?

[Numero Trois]

Curiously, the "Saved" section of my streaming queue has now disappeared...which means that when they mysteriously remove titles without any warning (as happened just a few weeks ago with Hawks' Monkey Business), I won't even realize it until I go looking for that particular title.

The other day I logged into my account for the first time in many months only to find my usually maxed-out queue only half-full. So that means there's over 200 titles that are gone from my queue with no way for me to either recall or paste them into a list. Of course there were many obscurities among them so it'll probably be a long time before I even get around to realizing which titles were missing.

Thankfully, the DVD queue still keeps "saved" titles at the bottom but one wonders for how long. What on earth are they thinking.

[Numero Trois]

Let us not forget that this is the same company that, at the height of social networking, removed their friend functionality

And the ability to make lists. But wait. Who could blame them? Everyone knows how film fanatics hate to make lists.

[Perkins Cobb]

Thankfully, the DVD queue still keeps "saved" titles at the bottom but one wonders for how long. What on earth are they thinking.

Well, they don't want you to know what you're missing, and for good reason. As they switch from a DVD business that bought almost every disc in print, to a streaming business that only offers maybe 10% of the content they once had on disc, that'll be vital to their success. And it'll work, too, because only us film nerds have long mental (or actual) lists of movies we want to see. I think most "civilians" rely on Netflix's recommendations, which of course only offer up titles that are actually available at the moment. (That really hit home this month when I had lunch with a former English teacher and his wife, who both felt that Netflix predicted their tastes with uncanny accuracy.) No wonder they spent $1 million on that algorithm.

[flyonthewall2983]

Is anyone else having trouble accessing the site?

Netflix hasn't been working for me for the last year and a half. Is anyone else experiencing this problem?

Is it saying the site is in a redirect loop?

[swo17]

I think so, it seems like it is trying to redirect me to Blockbuster.

[mfunk9786]

I've become convinced that swo is just an undercover shill for Blockbuster.

[swo17]

I've become convinced that swo is just an undercover shill for Blockbuster.

Actually, Blockbuster's just as bad or worse now, but it took Netflix becoming terrible to get me to reconsider giving BB my business in the first place.