[foobarbazoo]

Qwikster is a terrible name, and this is a terrible move.

Hastings is now in competition with that guy running HP to see who can destroy their company first.

Maybe Ballmer will get in the game and spin off Windows/Office from Microsoft, and rebrand them "Facetown", while proclaiming Bing to be the future of the company.

Unbelievable.

Update: I predict Qwikster is dead and buried within 5 years, and someone else pushes past Netflix on the streaming side to be the leader there.

This move is unbelievably stupid. Any trust I had in Netflix over the long haul is gone.

[arithmetic]

Netflix employee here.

I've been reading all the comments here and at Reed's blog to understand what everyone has to say about the split. Internally, we've known about the split for some time now.

Why do you think this is a terrible move? Your comment has a lot of unflattering comparisons, but doesn't explain why the move is stupid.

Also, you're probably right that DVD as a service will not last forever, and Reed understands that too (he mentions this in the post as well - http://blog.netflix.com/2011/09/explanation-and-some-reflect...). DVD service may not last very long, but right now, it is a growing business.

[cookiecaper]

It's a terrible move because you're splitting the business on an irrelevant implementation detail. There is one thing at the root of all this from a customer's perspective: watching TV and movies. Netflix as a unified DVD and streaming solution facilitated this well for reasons already mentioned; you could stream if streaming was available and desirable under the circumstances, but you could wait for the DVD if you had a good reason to do so, and these services both cooperated to enhance the customer's single experience and goal of watching movies.

There really is no reason this should not have been a significant internal restructuring offering the necessary resources to both divisions instead of a major public split like this. It's simply not a customer-facing issue. Now, as DVD becomes less and less relevant, Qwikster is doomed to an eventual shutdown, its users will lose their data (recommendations, rental history, reviews, etc) and/or Netflix will have to merge it back in to its database anyway, and there are just a myriad of other inconveniences from the user side.

Essentially, you broke something that was working well for its customers for the convenience of internal management and politicking.

[techdmn]

Just to share my personal experience: My wife and I have been Netflix customers for years. Streaming is pretty convenient for us, but two major problems: 1) lack of content and 2) lack of subtitles / closed captions. Captions are important because we watch movies at night, after the kids are in bed. That means we keep things are quiet enough that you occasionally miss a line of dialog. Because of those two issues we're back to DVDs in the mail. Here's my point:

While the services were integrated we could play with the online service (wait for it to improve) while still getting DVDs through the mail. It didn't cost any extra to try a streaming movie or two. Now that they are separate, checking up on the online service has a much higher cost, both monetarily and in terms of effort. Personally I'm disappointed, I liked streaming a lot, but for us it just wasn't quite there yet.

As others have said, the two services are complementary. I might like to know that I could watch a movie instantly instead of waiting for it in the mail, even if that's what I'd planned to do. Or that I could get a DVD in the mail because it isn't available for streaming.

As a customer I feel Netflix cares more about promoting streaming than keeping me as a customer. Rather than holding the door open so I can take my time converting to online content, I'm being pushed. Maybe right into a the arms of a competitor, because I'm not feeling the love from Netflix.

[ScottBurson]

I think Netflix has basically two kinds of customers: mainstream customers and long-tail customers. The mainstream will be fine with this, but for those of us who like to draw our content from the long tail, it sucks.

My wife and I were on streaming-only for a few months, but last month I upped our account to streaming+DVD again for just this reason -- the stuff we wanted to watch just wasn't available, and didn't look like it was going to be anytime soon.

[cellshade]

Netflix has closed captioning now. Works great on my Roku 2.

[metageek]

> Why do you think this is a terrible move?

Because the two services work well together. There are lots of movies and shows that you can't stream, but you can get on disc. Your data about what discs I rent improves your recommendations on the streaming side; and having one UI for both services makes me more likely to get them both from you. If Qwikster fully splits from Netflix, it'll have to compete on its own with other disc-only solutions.

Maybe you're going to radically improve your streaming library Real Soon Now; but, if so, the time to split is after that improvement, when streaming can better stand on its own.

[mcao]

Netflix customer here.

It's a terrible move because how I go about finding a movie to watch is very important to me. I want to be able to search for movies, browse a genre, or rate movies and get recommendations all through one easy to use interface. I will decide whether I want to stream the movie or wait for it in the mail. How you handle it internally I don't really care. I'm even willing to pay for the services separately.

Now, let's compare to cable. If I sign up for Comcast cable with HBO, I would also pay for the services separately. But, I don't want to have two boxes with two remotes sitting next to my TV just so I can watch HBO separately.

When I log into amazon.com I can buy physical items like DVDs, or purchase digital items like eBooks or MP3s, or I can stream movies. Maybe they're handled internally by different departments. I don't know and I don't care. All I know is that I can do everything from one interface with one account. I don't need to go to amazulu.com to watch movies and kindlebooks.com to buy books.

Simply put, convenience is a HUGE value. Something that I am willing to pay for. I didn't even sweat the Netflix price hike because the value was still there for me. But if you're going to make it HARDER for me to find and watch a movie, I don't see how that's worth paying for.

[e40]

It would be a debatably good move if the streaming catalog were deep. It is so shallow that during the DVD+streaming price hike/split, I canceled the streaming portion.

And, note that I'm setup perfectly for streaming. I have no TV/cable/dish. I get all my content from downloading TV and getting movies from you. If I could get TV from you on streaming, I'd abandon torrents.

It is really horrible watching Netflix implode like this.

[vital_sol]

I've been a Netflix customer for over 5 years. To me, Netflix is a company that does DVDs-by-mail well, and also trying to grow online streaming.

Online streaming as it is right now is a baby. It grows fast as every healthy baby does, but it can't be an adult yet as DVD business is. May be it will grow enough in the next few years, may be. So when Netflix announced separate price for DVDs and streaming, i cancelled streaming immediately, because it is not ready for me yet as a separate product I'm willing to pay for. It was good enough to have it as an addition, as a nice extra feature, but not good enough to pay extra.

So, in my opinion, there is (was?) one thing that Netflix is(was?) doing well, and now, what is this company doing anyway? What are their business? Oh, it's a video streaming over the internet, just like Hulu or Youtube?

I think Netflix just shot itself in the head.

[sammyo]

From the outside it appears that Netflix is reacting late to market forces and business partners. Netflix had seemed to be growing in size and more importantly 'clout'. The 'media biz' is run on relationships, trading huge favors and controlling vertical markets. If Netflix has little influence or trading tokens then it will eventually be marginalized. Blockbuster seemed to be just just what it's title implies for a while, now it seems more like a blip.

[WalterBright]

Netflix is wrecking the huge advantage they have. Now it will be just another streaming company. Netflix has leveled the advantage it had, opening up huge opportunity for competitors.

[commandar]

>I predict Qwikster is dead and buried within 5 years

This is the direction the physical DVD side of Netflix's business was going anyway.