Add Netflix to My List

In the last few months, Verizon, Microsoft, our car dealer,  and Google (Blogger) have incurred my wrath. Now it’s Netflix.

Yesterday morning I, along with millions of other people, received an e-mail from Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix, informing us of the separation of his DVD rental business and his video streaming business.

When streaming first began, it was an free adjunct to the DVD rentals. I thought it was a great idea. I streamed movies quite often to my computer. It worked quite well. At the time, we had DSL Lite which is a slow version of regular DSL. I never had any problem with buffering or any delay in the movies. The only problem was the contrast on my monitor made the pictures too dark, and I couldn’t get it adjusted properly. Then they changed the player and shot my streaming to hell. The videos would be interrupted numerous times, and each time it took longer to resume. I stopped streaming.

Recently we upgraded to a faster DSL, and I could again stream movies to my computer.

Last Christmas, Mr. Fixit and I bought a streaming device to attach to the television. Mr. Fixit watched old B/W westerns for days on end. The only problem with this was my internet speed was greatly reduced. It would take a lot longer for pages to load. After the “new” wore off, Mr. Fixit only streams videos occasionally. I seldom stream because the videos I prefer are not available for streaming.

Now Netflix has decided that they will start charging a fee for streaming and another fee for DVD rental. Okay, that’s their privilege, but I don’t intend to pay an extra fee for fewer videos offered for streaming. The selection is just too small compared to the selection of DVD’s available.

My complaint is that they didn’t give me a choice before billing me this month. I checked my bill and they decided that I would partake of both services. In order to discontinue this streaming, I had to opt out.

It seems to me that I should have given me the choice to opt in before billing me for a service I don’t want. I will pay the extra $8.00 this month, but I have already opted out for streaming.

Mr. Hastings may have made a major business error with this whole deal. I think that he should have procured a larger library for streaming than he has now before he started charging for the service. A million people have cancelled the service since the separation was announced. I think many, many more people will choose to forego any service from this company until he has more product to offer.