Netflix to do away with Profiles
By Darren Murph 
posted Jun 20th 2008 9:00AM
posted Jun 20th 2008 9:00AM
[Thanks, Kris]
posted Jun 20th 2008 9:00AM
Now that we've thrown 'em off the trail, use the form below to get in touch with the people at Engadget. Please fill in all of the required fields because they're required.
I didn't know about this feature, but if I did I sure would have used. My fiancee is always complaining about how her movies are behind mine (can't help it that my movie choices are better :P )
This change affects me more than when they dumped HDDVD (I didnt even have bluray at the time). Now my wife and I have to share the same que?? That sucks so much!
Does blockbuster have multiple profiles/ques??
Your married you DUMBASS you have to share with your wife! IDIOT.
I personally don't use it, but my family does. They split the 3-at-a-time plan 2/3 ways, depending on the time of the year. I don't think my mom will continue her subscription if they remove this because it will cause more wars in our house then anything else.
And if she doesn't cancel, she'll just lower her movie plan to one at a time. I hope netflix gets it through their heads that this is a huge mistake when it comes to families. Instead of families being stupid and getting the 4-8 movies at a time plan, they will just get separate 3 movies a month plans, making everything even more messy.
"Instead of families being stupid and getting the 4-8 movies at a time plan, they will just get separate 3 movies a month plans, making everything even more messy."
Yeah, Netflix is really dumb. Instead of that family having a single $24 per month or slightly more plan, they will have 3 x $16 per month plans.
They obviously have no idea what they are doing to get double the revenue from a family that is hooked on having separate queues.
Let's look at this logically, because before doing something like this, a company like Netflix has. They probably see three things happening:
1. Many/most users will keep their current plans and try to manage getting movies 'manually' now which bring in the same revenue each month
2. Some users who are addicted to the profile system will do as you say and upgrade to having multiple full accounts which will bring in more revenue in the best case, about the same revenue in the worse case where the separate accounts are lower # of disk accounts
3. Some users will downgrade their accounts which will bring in less revenue
Now when you consider what real live normal average people will do (which neither of us are as we both go to sites like EngadgetHD), #1 will probably be the majority, and some of those might even upgrade to higher # of disk plans to make the manual management easier. I suspect that the amount of people in #2 will be enough to make Netflix more money even when you factor in people from #3.
Check your math Shawn. The 3 DVD plan is $5.40 a DVD, anything above that is $6 a DVD... meaning if families move to 2 3 DVD plans Netflix will lose $2 a month.
next time you want to be a sarcastic jerk, make sure you know what you're talking about.
This is really a pain for my household as we spend a lot of time out of town and like to switch queues when one or the other is away. I can't really think of one single way that this could "help to continue to improve the Netflix website for all customers" - can you?
The wife and I loved this feature when we moved over from Blockbuster. Very sad to see it go. We, also, do not see how this is an 'improvement'.
hell I had another profile setup......
but the wife still used mine anyways.........so hell doesnt bother me any....
This sucks! I am getting really annoyed with netflix. Things that I use are just disappearing. First is was HD-DVD (not that I fault them), now the profiles, next they are planning on raising the price for blu-ray users too. I wish they would consider adding to the user experience in stead of taking away from it! "Improve the web Netflix site" my arse!
I canceled my netflix last week. No need to pay $120 for DirecTV HD and Netflix when I just end up going to the local video store to get the new release Blu-ray's anyway.
This is a total P.I.T.A. My family has different tastes in movies and we survive by having separate profiles on Netflix. This will completely screw up movie recommendations based on ratings for my wife and I and will not allow for filtering of movies selected by the kids. This is the worst move ever!!
Can we have a class-action lawsuit since they said "...for all customers."? Not really but you get the point.
I don't believe that BB has profiles (haven't looked). If the wife and I were still on Netfilx, they added a premium for Blu-Ray and dropped profiles, we'd have to think about our subscription.
That said, we already switched to Blockbuster and are enjoying the in store swaps. We can get BD titles in store that are very long wait online. It doesn't completely make up for the smaller catalog, but it evens out.
If it were more than just the wife and I, this would be an issue.
Hey Blockbuster, want to get some more customers?
Yea my wife and I love the profiles as we have slightly different tastes. Luckily we like the same movies alot. So this wont be as bad, but still quite annoying. It will mean more time spent playing on the netflix site everytime we watch movies. I love being able to see what she has rated movies and how similiar or unlike our tastes are.
They're going to continue to improve the website by removing a popular feature? Bizarre. Why do companies come out with such lame reasons?
This is really annoying. I enjoy the profile system, since my wife likes to keep movies longer than I do. Its very easy to keep us both with a few movies we want without having to constantly log in to double check whats coming, especially considering how many BD titles are "long wait"
RIP Netflix: 9/1/2008...
When, Why, How -- How will it improve the site? I never used profiles -- sounds like a useful feature, but with features comes complexity. Profiles was probably high maintenance for their support team. What they should do is disable the feature for anyone asking for support. Come up with a nice way of saying it's too complicated for you -- but don't penalize users who can figure it out by dumbing down to the lowest common denominator.
My wife and I are also disappointed with this news. I don't see how this improves anything, except hits to their website, as now almost every day one of us wi'll have to go to the queue and shuffle things around so we don't end up with 3 movies at home for one person and none for the other.
If they don't come up with a similar feature, I will have to cancel my subscription. Managing one queue to share with others is not something I want to deal with.
This totally sucks, I'm either going to have to stop sharing movies w/ my wife and kids, or start spending a bunch of extra time managing my queue.
BB Online does not have multiple queues. I just got this response from their customer service folks:
"I appreciate you for taking time to submit this inquiry. However, the feature you are referring to is not available. I would like to assure you that we are working very hard to think of more ways on how our customers can enjoy their membership here in Blockbuster Online even better. This includes improving our website layout and giving our customers more options and flexible queue management.
Nevertheless, I have forwarded you suggestions to the appropriate department for review. We appreciate your feedback and suggestions on how we can better serve your entertainment needs. We take your comments very seriously and welcome them, as a valuable tool needed to improve the quality of our service.
Always here to help,
Customer Care Associate
BLOCKBUSTER Online"
If BB Online offered multiple queues, I'd be leaving Netflix in a heartbeat, but since they don't I'm torn between staying with Netflix and continuing to give them money even though their prices continue to rise, features are being taken away or switching to BB but having to give money to "corporate" giant and having to xfr my large queue from one service to another.
Here's hoping that Netflix decides to change their mind and keep multiple queues.
Brian
This was a money move, pure and simple.
They may be trying to curb account sharing based on informal neighbor arrangements.
I think it's pretty lame. The profile feature was pretty useful.
I suspect they assume that some family's will buy another account, therefore Netflix will get more revenue each month.
I left Netflix when BB started the in store trade in. I manage with my kids in a very simple way:
- I get all the online rental
- When we go to BB store they get to pick their movies (two teenage girls, if they argue in the store then I just say forget it and get more movies that I like, that stopped the arguments pretty fast)/
I don't see what the big deal is. I actually talk to the people in my house and we decide on what DVDs we want next. It's not like we're going to be getting less DVDs or anything. Just move things around in the queue for goodness sake!
It's a big deal because moving things around in the queue is a pain. There are queue limits on the number of movies you can have.
The other issue is with recommendations. Profiles allow you to tailor recommendations to your own preferences instead of your housemate/wife/kid, because each profile can rate movies uniquely. I certainly don't want to get recs for the crappy chick flicks my GF rents.
Netflix is being very consumer hostile by unceremoniously deleting all these ratings/queues without any way to migrate them.
There are a lot of pissed off people because of this, myself included. For concerned users, see this page:
http://www.hackingnetflix.com/2008/06/netflix-elimina.html
this is a dealbreaker for me - the issue isn't so much about queue management, it's recommendations and grading. i do NOT grade movies the way my partner does... and she has the primary account. where will my grades go? i have about 700 movies graded... wtf?
THIS SUCKS!
I have 3 separate queues: Me, Girlfriend and TV Shows. Trying to juggle all that is going to suck balls.
Thanks for nothing Netflix? Did Blockbuster Online ever set up separate queues? Maybe it's time to go back!
My girlfriend and I are not happy about this. Not happy at all. I'm not sure how this will work with all the social oriented features - it's kind of nice to see friend's queues and analyze similarities - but I doubt it will work well. Of course all my girlfriend's picks will become part of my queue and only one of us will be able to rate things (otherwise it seems pointless as it will pick things for an amalgamation of the two of us and no one will be happy). And the 300 pound gorilla in the room is obviously that we'll have to juggle our queues on a regular basis to keep movies evenly distributed between the two of us. Who knows, maybe there will be such a huge outcry that they'll rescind this change. If we were to get two separate accounts it'd be $4 more a month which is, though deceptively small, really quite a bit over time - especially when it's for a virtual feature (ie no cost to them) that we already have. I hate it when corporations try to act like they're helping us (cough MPAA http://www.engadgethd.com/2008/06/11/fcc-wants-to-hear-your-voice-on-the-mpaas-latest-drm-proposal/ ) when they make changes purely to increase the bottom line. If they were more straightforward about it and just said they needed to make more money to make ends meet it wouldn't bother me as much - but instead they say they're making this change to benefit us when it clearly doesn't. Oh well.
as i believe at last one person has mentioned, if you have a tv series you are watching, you don't usually want to have two discs in the series at home at the same time usually. and a lot of times you would want the next disc in the series to be sent automatically.
i (and a lot of people) take the time to set up our queues, and netflix has worked perfectly up to this point (and since profiles were introduced in 2005) as far as shipping out the movies we want in the order we have specified days, weeks, months, or even years in advance. now netflix is taking back that control -- now it is their movies that they will send to you when they want to.
think about it this way, if aol told you couldn't have multiple e-mail accounts, they were going to delete all your secondary accounts, and your family was going to have to share one account, do you think that would work? you wouldn't want your kids looking at your online banking information any more than you would want your 5-year old adding R-rated movies to the family netflix account (but you may want to be able to save the happening, for example, to your queue, so you don't want to put a restriction on the entire account whereby only G and PG movies could be added to the Queue)
Eh, I left Netflix some time ago over throttling issues. I don't understand how this would help consumers.
i hope they get rid of the friends and community features too. those are pretty hard to use
Don't like their decision? Let Netflix know!
Spread the word!
http://www.keepnetflixprofiles.org
http://www.cafepress.com/keepflixprofile
My wife is the primary account holder in our household and I get one disc at a time off her queue. We were using profiles and I am definitely sad to hear it's going away. There's absolutely zero overlap between my wife's queue and mine. I don't know how we're going to manage this when Sept. comes around.