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I wasn't so lucky with them. I was a good customer, but they started silently throttling my account, and they wouldn't admit to it either. It's since come out t

I wasn't so lucky with them. I was a good customer, but they started silently throttling my account, and they wouldn't admit to it either. It's since come out that that's exactly what they were doing. If it's too expensive to send me that many disks, fine, but don't lie to me about it.

danilocampos 16y ago
I didn't know about this. So much for my remark on integrity. Do you know if they still do this throttling? I personally never ran into this -- I've never been more than a light-to-medium user, except in spikes. Like when I when I discovered 24 six years ago. edit: Here's something straight from the horse's mouth: http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/05/28/100034248/index.htm http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/... "I stopped my subscription to your service because of your well-documented "throttling" of frequent renters. How can you say you are focused on customer service when you alienate your customers in this way? Bill Greenstein, Seattle When we are short on new releases, which we try not to be, we believe it's fairest to allocate those new movies to subscribers who have not rented much recently. This upsets heavy users because they are not in the front of the line for new releases. We are straightforward about how it works, but not everyone likes that policy." Eh, okay, assuming it begins and ends there, I can see the argument for doing things this way.
- smartrly 16y ago
  The accusation was that if you were an exceptionally heavy user of the service, they'd start taking 2 or 3 days to send your next movie after you returned one. That said, I'm not sure what the threshold was, because I was a very heavy user during that time and I never hit the problem. As such, whatever the threshold was, it was high.
- pmichaud 16y ago
  I don't really go for new release type movie generally, so I call shenanigans. I was a heavy user who got movies sometimes the day after I returned the last one, which was great. Then I started getting them 3, 4, 5 days later. They blamed USPS, even though no other mail to or from me was slow at all, so I started tracking the returned movies. They uniformly were delivered back to the warehouse just as quickly as before, but remained (via the netflix interface) unreturned for several days after that. Normally I'd chalk that up to simple incompetence: they just weren't processing the movies very fast and/or their backend system was a piece of shit. I could buy that. But I'd seen just how efficient they could be when they _wanted_ to be, ie before I passed the "heavy user" threshold, so I knew they were doing it deliberately. I get the logic, I'm a heavy user, they can only send so many movies before I'm not profitable. But like I said before: don't lie to me about it. I would've paid extra for a premium "heavy user" account if they had offered me the option, but instead they pretended USPS was magically slow JUST for netflix movies, and they permanently lost a customer. Their loss.
  - rubyrescue 16y ago
    Addressing the 'Their loss' comment - Netflix could be happy you left from a business standpoint. I've talked to wireless carrier network execs who can speak specifically to the type of subscribers who they would like to encourage to leave the network.
    - pmichaud 16y ago
      They are only happy because they weren't charging me enough, and I was willing to pay that extra cost too, so it really is their loss.
kakuri 16y ago
I live in a big city where they have a local warehouse and they consistently ship movies to me really fast. I'm on the cheapest plan ($8/mo) and when I send a movie back, they get it the next day, and in the same day send out a new one. At that level of service it was already easily worth $8, but now they have an awesomely expanding offering of HD streaming content which makes it tremendously more valuable to me.

danilocampos 16y ago

I didn't know about this. So much for my remark on integrity. Do you know if they still do this throttling? I personally never ran into this -- I've never been more than a light-to-medium user, except in spikes. Like when I when I discovered 24 six years ago. edit: Here's something straight from the horse's mouth: http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/05/28/100034248/index.htm http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/... "I stopped my subscription to your service because of your well-documented "throttling" of frequent renters. How can you say you are focused on customer service when you alienate your customers in this way? Bill Greenstein, Seattle When we are short on new releases, which we try not to be, we believe it's fairest to allocate those new movies to subscribers who have not rented much recently. This upsets heavy users because they are not in the front of the line for new releases. We are straightforward about how it works, but not everyone likes that policy." Eh, okay, assuming it begins and ends there, I can see the argument for doing things this way.

smartrly 16y ago
The accusation was that if you were an exceptionally heavy user of the service, they'd start taking 2 or 3 days to send your next movie after you returned one. That said, I'm not sure what the threshold was, because I was a very heavy user during that time and I never hit the problem. As such, whatever the threshold was, it was high.
pmichaud 16y ago
I don't really go for new release type movie generally, so I call shenanigans. I was a heavy user who got movies sometimes the day after I returned the last one, which was great. Then I started getting them 3, 4, 5 days later. They blamed USPS, even though no other mail to or from me was slow at all, so I started tracking the returned movies. They uniformly were delivered back to the warehouse just as quickly as before, but remained (via the netflix interface) unreturned for several days after that. Normally I'd chalk that up to simple incompetence: they just weren't processing the movies very fast and/or their backend system was a piece of shit. I could buy that. But I'd seen just how efficient they could be when they _wanted_ to be, ie before I passed the "heavy user" threshold, so I knew they were doing it deliberately. I get the logic, I'm a heavy user, they can only send so many movies before I'm not profitable. But like I said before: don't lie to me about it. I would've paid extra for a premium "heavy user" account if they had offered me the option, but instead they pretended USPS was magically slow JUST for netflix movies, and they permanently lost a customer. Their loss.
- rubyrescue 16y ago
  Addressing the 'Their loss' comment - Netflix could be happy you left from a business standpoint. I've talked to wireless carrier network execs who can speak specifically to the type of subscribers who they would like to encourage to leave the network.
  - pmichaud 16y ago
    They are only happy because they weren't charging me enough, and I was willing to pay that extra cost too, so it really is their loss.

kakuri 16y ago

I live in a big city where they have a local warehouse and they consistently ship movies to me really fast. I'm on the cheapest plan ($8/mo) and when I send a movie back, they get it the next day, and in the same day send out a new one. At that level of service it was already easily worth $8, but now they have an awesomely expanding offering of HD streaming content which makes it tremendously more valuable to me.