Yep. How long till Qwikster announces their new feature....STREAMING.

qwikster lololol

my best guess as to why they split the company apart is probably to save money on licensing somehow. they need to keep their costs down (just like everyone else these days) so what else is left? 2 support teams, 2 web portals, 2 of everything is not going to be a cost savings, so that just leaves licensing.

 

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That sounds like a plausible scenario but I can't help but think that they took this route for marketing reasons that were based on really faulty assumptions. It seems that way to me because the last two months [or whatever] has been a PR fiasco of their own creation.

I personally really liked their concept and model and when I first heard about the rate change I thought it sounded like the typical complaints you hear from MMO players after a big change has been proposed or gone through and thought the clients were just having a hissy fit, but since then I have lost confidence in that view and am tending to believe that Netflix just screwed their own pooch.

I hope they recover because I still like the original concept & business model.

The article mentioned spinning off as a separate company. That turned out to be incorrect. They are spinning it off as a separate division and brand. So Qwikster will still be part of Netflix, just separate. Including separate accounts, queues, and billing.

And as Speak said, the speculation this may be at least partly an effort to improve it's license negotiations. Before with DVD and streaming accounts combined it made it's streaming user base appear larger, so content owners wanted more money. Now that the DVD business and accounts are completely separate, Netflix can now show the content owners a more accurate picture of how many streaming users it has.

1) The Qwickster name is terrible.
2) The fact that Qwickster and Netflix won't be integrated websites will make it far less likely that a user of one company will decide to also sign up for the other.
3) While the amount of streaming content has improved a lot, it still is puny compared to DVD content. And virtually all newly released movies do not appear on streaming for many months.
4) It's not at all clear that adding more and more content is the future of streaming. The Starz! situation may only be the first of a chain of events that removes content from streaming.
5) I've already switched to watching streaming on Amazon Prime and canceled my Netflix streaming. While Prime doesn't have anything close to the amount of content as Netflix yet, it's a far better value since it also gives you free 2 day shipping on most purchases on Amazon.com (and maybe soon will also give you free Kindle e-books). If Amazon moves aggressively to sign up new streaming content for Prime, they could kill Netflix as thoroughly as Netflix killed Blockbuster.

 

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I cancelled my Disc service yesterday. I found I do a lot more streaming anyway and Discs tend to sit around for a while before being watched. The "Qwickster" crap just sealed the deal.

 

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Someone has a theory on why Netflix has done something so crazy.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-20110165-93/netflix-split-to-set-up-amazon-streaming-merger/

The theory is Netflix wants to sell itself to Amazon. Amazon however would not be interesting in buy Netflix as a whole because of it's DVD rental business would force Amazon to collect sales tax. Netflix has physical distribution centers for mailing DVDs and if your company has a physical presence in a state, you usually have to collect sales tax.

So split off the declining DVD business and Amazon can buy Netflix's streaming only business. Amazon's content library triples. Amazon would want this to better compete against Apple.

This would be monumentally awesome if this is actually what Netflix is going to do. But this isn't even a rumor, it's just someone speculating.

Step 1 - Piss of customers
Step 2 - Spin off DvD business
Step 3 - ????
Step 4 - ACQUISITION!!

 

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I saw that on Cnet. My question is: why would Amazon need to buy Netflix to get that content? Surely it could just acquire the same content from the media companies directly.

 

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If this were the case, just make the change and do it. Pissing off your customer base repeatedly doesn't seem smart. I still can't figure out who thought this new name is a good idea... Brand'ing is far more important than these guys comprehend.

 

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