

Netflix listens to customers, keeps profiles - mace
http://blog.netflix.com/

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ericb
Interesting to think of this in terms of 37 Signals feature-minimalism and
"say no" philosophies. Once added, this feature became a weight netflix had to
carry through it's designs and keep working. Netflix chose to listen to the
minority of customers and keep it--to not "say no." Would 37 signals have
listened or just "said no", I wonder?

I think keeping the feature was a good move--the profiles feature previously
stopped me from canceling my account under a barrage of my wife's chick flicks
that kept "accidentally" topping the queue. :-)

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ivey
The threat of losing profiles made my household seriously consider how useful
Netflix was for us. Since I'm paring down expenses anyway because of shifting
from consultant to startup founder, we decided it wasn't worth it. Cancelled
yesterday. I briefly considered re-activating today, but we'll be OK with
iTunes.

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mace
It's nice to see Netflix keep the feature, though I myself do not use it. The
customer outcry was considerable; See NYT
(<http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/06/23/monday-2/>).

Netflix's motivation to retain the feature was no doubt out of fear of losing
customers rather than any type of benevolence. It would've been a huge gaff
for them to lose customers over it; especially considering the strong
competition from Apple, Hulu, and the television studios adding to the
existing competition from Blockbuster, the cable and satellite providers.

Chalk part of this win up to market competition.

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smanek
I've been wanting to sign up for netflix for a while ... but their streaming
video app is windows only.

I have an iMac running leopard and a thinkpad x60 running ubuntu. The day
netflix provides a mac/linux client, is the day I'll sign up.

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LogicHoleFlaw
To be honest, I hadn't heard of the profile feature until the brouhaha came
out about them being canceled.

Of course, now that I know the feature exists I'm going to start using it
immediately.

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sah
It's interesting that this feature turned out to be important enough to
customers that Netflix ultimately decided it was better to keep it, but
apparently Netflix wasn't able to see that in its usage.

