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I still can not fathom the thinking that leads to this: "This was Netflix's first venture outside of the United States, and because the company wasn't offering

I still can not fathom the thinking that leads to this: "This was Netflix's first venture outside of the United States, and because the company wasn't offering its traditional DVD-by-mail plan to Canadians, its prospects seemed questionable. How many people would pay $7.99 per month (Canadian) for the chance to watch Superbad whenever they wanted? A lot, it turns out." PROSPECTS SEEMED QUESTIONABLE?! Really, because people wouldn't be able to wait at their mailboxes for a whole day waiting for a tiny sip of media and instead can instantly watch a huge library... how does this make sense? It would be like if Google had 2 options, snail-mail you the results printed on a piece of paper or normal website google, and everyone was fretting that they couldn't get the snail-mail option.

wmf 16y ago
Netflix's streaming library isn't very good and it was questionable whether people would pay $8/month for it. So far people in the US have been getting streaming "free" in addition to regular Netflix.
allenp 16y ago
Netflix has some pretty decent tech-chops, so they probably took a good look at the number of discs subscribers were getting and comparing that to the amount of on-demand used to figure out the percentage of subscribers who were close to 100% on-demand only and going from there. It isn't like it they just blindly said, "hey let's try this." It could also be the writer trying to add some drama to an otherwise straightforward part of the story.