While you’ll still have to pay two separate fees for physical discs and streaming from Netflix, at least you won’t have to log into two separate sites to use them.
The on-line content provider reversed its course today, announcing that it will not break out rental of discs onto a separate web site. For now, both streaming and home delivery of discs will stay under the one site.
“Consumers value the simplicity Netflix has always offered and we respect that,” said Netflix co-founder and CEO Reed Hastings in a statement. “There is a difference between moving quickly – which Netflix has done very well for years – and moving too fast, which is what we did in this case.”
In a blog post, he said: “It is clear that for many of our members two websites would make things more difficult, so we are going to keep Netflix as one place to go for streaming and DVDs. This means no change: one website, one account, one password…in other words, no Qwikster.”
Hastings added in the blog post: “While the July price change was necessary, we are now done with price changes.”
It was a bad business decision in the first place and I’m glad to see somoneone over at Netflix came to their senses. Wonder if that scathing SNL skit last week had anything to do with it?
no I think it was the drop in membership and stock price that did it
I’m not changing my subscription level, and I’m happy with Netflix (now that they have abandoned the stupid idea of splitting into 2 websites), but I have whiplash from all my eye-rolling. They have lost all the public good will they had built up over the years.
Part of me thinks they announced Qwickster (or whatever) in an effort to distract from the price hikes… But then again I don’t think destroying your stock price is a good business move just for some good PR when they decide to “listen” to everyone and abandon that boneheaded idea…
Never did join, and doubt I will at this point. Paying for 2 separate but similar services to me is like buying a radio and having to pay for Am and pay for FM. At least when Sirius/XM merged, they moved a lot of their similar and not so similar programs onto each others networks so you were not forced to have to pay twice for the same services. I thought about the streaming service but heard that you’d have to pay for individual units(1 for TV, 1 for Xbox streaming, 1 for Smartphone Streaming, etc) and decided it wasn’t worth it either. Is that part actually true? I’ve only heard this when they first announced the separation earlier, but since I’m not a customer, I can only go on hearsay.
You do not have to pay for each device you stream to. I stream to my iPhone, iPad, desktop, laptop and my AppleTV and have never had to pay a per-device charge.