By snoadmin
On Sept. 15, Netflix dropped a bomb on their customers when they announced that they are splitting the company into two parts. The online streaming will still be called Netflix, but the red envelopes you get in the mail will now come from a website called “Qwikster.”
A person who still wants to get both services will have to manage and update two different queues, and be billed by two different companies.
This is obviously Netflix’s first step toward an all-streaming system, which people have been suspecting for a while now. The streaming, which was once just a bonus for Netflix users while they waited for their mailers, is now even more popular than the mailers themselves.
This change has put a lot of Netflix users at a crossroads, not sure of what to do. Some of them dropped both services immediately. Netflix has lost close to one million users so far, and most of the people who stayed are going to stick with Netflix and ditch Qwikster.
For college students, the streaming-only option is the obvious choice. Most college students don’t have a permanent living situation so the mailers are a hassle. It makes more sense for dormers to abstain from getting Netflix DVDs sent to their dorm rooms.
Unfortunately, this move toward streaming is going to cause a gap in what we are able to watch. Blockbuster stores are becoming increasingly hard to find, and RedBox kiosk rental services only carry new releases. Any movie that is over one-year-old and is not on Netflix streaming will be nearly impossible to watch.
The Netflix streaming selection is still far from complete. Almost none of the films are new releases, and the selection they do have is completely random. They have some quality television shows like “Breaking Bad” and “Mad Men,” but they are missing a lot of content if they want to go off on their own.
This is different from how it was back in the day, where if you couldn’t find a movie at one Blockbuster, you could check Hollywood Video or drive for five minutes to another Blockbuster to try your luck there. If you couldn’t find it that night, you could put it on your Netflix queue and have it in a few days.
It has become about instant gratification and convenience for people, which is not necessarily a good thing. If someone wants to watch “The Godfather,” and it isn’t on Netflix, they would rather choose something else from the mediocre selection than go seek out the movie that they actually want. We are limiting the content available to us in the name of convenience.
Also, the streaming service is often lower quality than a Blu-ray disk, depending on how strong the Wi-Fi connection is to the device you’re using Netflix on. Fans of high definition picture may end up with an inferior quality.
It used to be fun to support Netflix because it was an up-and-coming company that was competing with giants like Blockbuster. However, now Netflix has become the giant, and we have to deal with the changes that come with its size.
Sure, Qwikster is still available for any film that’s not on Netflix, but who knows how long that is going to last. It doesn’t seem like there are many Qwikster supporters, and it is guaranteed to fail once streaming picks up momentum. It’s almost as if Netflix set Qwikster up so it could go out of business without dragging down the Netflix name.
If they wanted it to succeed, they surely wouldn’t have called it “Qwikster,” which is hard to spell and makes no sense at all, considering it is obviously less “quick” than the streaming.
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