Netflix Kills Qwikster

gclef writes "Netflix has apparently decided that spinning off their DVD business into a separate organization was a bad idea after all, and is killing off the 'Qwikster' concept. From the article: 'Less than a month ago, the Netflix said it would split the DVD rental business off on a new website, to be called Qwikster. Subscribers howled at the move, saying they saw Netflix as a destination for movies in general and didn’t want to manage two accounts. “It is clear that for many of our members two websites would make things more difficult, so we are going to keep Netflix as one place to go for streaming and DVDs,” CEO Reed Hastings said in the blog post.'"

Re:Too little, too late

[eepok]

I don't think it's too little nor too late. This is two major decisions that they've turned around and admitted that they didn't appropriately measure their audience correctly-- BEFORE implementation. How many companies do you know that do that?

Their actions were affected by their audience... do we have expectations above and beyond that?

Integration with Facebook?

[knitting fool]

A guest on an NPR show the other day speculated that a partnership with Facebook was part of the motivation for the split. The gentleman described Facebook's new "tell everyone exactly what you are doing right now including naming the movies you are currently watching" plan, and then speculated that current privacy laws wouldn't allow Netflix to share information about DVD rentals. The privacy laws for streaming, he thought, might be a bit hazier, and by separating the two Netflix might be free to share that information with Facebook.

Sorry I can't find a link to the article at the moment. It was the first not-insanely-unreasonable argument I had heard for the division. (although perhaps still a bit unreasonable.)

Re:Customers

[jandrese]

That's still a substantial customer base reduction in such a short period of time, and it doesn't even count the people who dropped one part of their service and/or downgraded their plans. Those people could be one step away from cancelling entirely.

Qwikster was such a stupid name anyway.