Profiles going away!?
Did everyone else get this e-mail from Netflix:
" We wanted to let you know we will be eliminating Profiles, the feature that allowed you to set up separate DVD Queues under one account, effective September 1, 2008."
Why?
"While it may be disappointing to see Profiles go away, this change will help us continue to improve the Netflix website for all our customers."
Okay, how does Profiles going away improve Netflix? Am I the only one in household with multiple people each of whom want a different queue for tracking, rating, reviews, etc. Furthermore, according to the FAQ, there's no way to even transfer a Profile to a new separate account. So that means if you spent time rating tons of movies under one profile, all of that is lost! This seems like a huge disruption of service. In what way is this good? And there's not even any way I can see to match the equivalent functionality once they go away.
This to me is a huge negative change to the service for no visible reason.
Ernie
" We wanted to let you know we will be eliminating Profiles, the feature that allowed you to set up separate DVD Queues under one account, effective September 1, 2008."
Why?
"While it may be disappointing to see Profiles go away, this change will help us continue to improve the Netflix website for all our customers."
Okay, how does Profiles going away improve Netflix? Am I the only one in household with multiple people each of whom want a different queue for tracking, rating, reviews, etc. Furthermore, according to the FAQ, there's no way to even transfer a Profile to a new separate account. So that means if you spent time rating tons of movies under one profile, all of that is lost! This seems like a huge disruption of service. In what way is this good? And there's not even any way I can see to match the equivalent functionality once they go away.
This to me is a huge negative change to the service for no visible reason.
Ernie
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by ewd76 on -
irate customers
Inconvenient though it may be, is this something really worth becoming irate over? Maybe I have just spent too much time on the other side of calls like that.
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Permalink Reply by Joe C on -
I respectfully disagree with you, this is a vital feature in my household and in what appears to be a growing number of users. As someone Also in customer service, I have found many of the p.o'd customers I have to deal with are due to 'Management' making ill informed decisions without any respect for the users or their input. That results in me being treated rudely in many instances. If this is such a drag on their system (with is a big fib), why not let people who have no use for it opt out?
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Permalink Reply by mpyusko on -
I agree with you eleventy billion percent!!!!
I'm a stay-at-home-dad, I watch 5x as many movies a month as my wife and her queue. If we had to sort it out of one, it would be a royal pain in the "rear". I had even recently considered upgrading our account so I could add a queue for the kids filled with Veggietales, Bob the Builder, Jakers, etc. Well, it' looks like I won't be doing that now.
It looks like I'll be downgrading my account and sending the wife to Blockbuster if she wants to watch a movie.
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Permalink Reply by Thomas on -
I don't get it. If only 1% of the customer base uses this feature (and I'm a part of that 1%), how could it possibly create that much of a drag on site performance and disc space?
I've written Customer Service and I think I will call tomorrow. This is something which really bothers me. This is one of the features I really liked and took advantage of.
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Permalink Reply by jennhay on -
What a load of... If only 1% of users use profiles they wouldn't affect server performance/storage at all, seriously. Making up that baloney adds insult to injury.
What Netflix is doing is trying to get more money. If people really want separate profiles, now they have to have separate accounts! That means more money for them!
I love Netflix, but this action just destroyed my customer loyalty.
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Permalink Reply by Jim on -
Once again, the power users suffer. As another poster pointed out, Netflix has just lost an edge against Blockbuster, who probably has a larger video base anyway as well as the local stores. What is really bad about this foolish decision by Netflix is they are not providing any kind of service to merge queues. I'll be voting with my dollars.
Also as a software engineer, I'd bet their implementation of profiles is poor if it is such a resource hog. If they are worried about slow performance, how about letting me turn of the "let us shove more movie suggestions in your face" feature. If their back-end is doing database queries, I'll bet the real-time suggestion feature sucks more cycles and I/O bandwidth than dealing with profiles.
I use the profiles for when my daughter visits. I put all of the movies she wants to watch in her queue. About four to five days before she arrives, I switch to her queue and send all my movies back.
What we (Netflix users) could use is a front-end to Netflix, a program that maintains queues, prioritizes, etc., and then interacts with the Netflix web pages to add movies to your soon-to-be-single queue. We would have the same functionality, probably a whole lot more, in fact. If any Firefox programmers are listening, how about a plug-in?
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Permalink Reply by ~*~ Erin ~*~ on -
This seems to be their response to everything. Such a small amount use it so it's not needed....Well, I doubt only 1% of Netflix users use it. I know several friends online use it, and a friend offline who does.
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Permalink Reply by Bryan on -
I think the above posters are right, the alternative is to pay them more money... which is an ignorant thing to do, of course. But new customers will come along and happily pay them never knowing the difference. Sigh.
Corporate America: 10123234221
You: 0
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Permalink Reply by matt on -
Thats just it the profiles work like new accounts, except a second profile was free where as a new account cost money...you dont see them having a problem adding new accounts and creating these new profiles!!!!!
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Permalink Reply by Clauclauclaudia on -
But for the same number of disk rentals, it's really not more money for Netflix.
If my girlfriend and I go to two 1-disc at a time accounts instead of 1 2-disc at a time account, it's pretty much a financial wash for Netflix.
On the other hand, if I'm disgusted at the effort it would take to redo all my ratings and preferences and we go to *one* 1-disc at a time account, Netflix loses. And that's... not unlikely.
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Permalink Reply by droidmaker on -
Yea, this is disappointing for sure. For those of us who have used and rely on profiles (and if i recall correctly, this was the majority of netflix employees), this is a hard blow. But this has been debated for a long time, and the painful fact was that very very very few people used it. When used, it was loved. But the "tax" was significant and was posing problems in the site and making it slower to roll out new features and fix old ones... in the end i guess it was decided that even with the (risk) of losing disgrunted customers, it would make the ongoing improvements so much better for so many millions of people, it couldn't be avoided any longer. I'm bummed (and I promise you, most the employees are too), but i guess it had to be done.
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