Thursday, July 14, 2011

What Would You Have Me Do?



Hey everybody, as you could probably tell – my blog has been on hiatus since ending the ABC DVD collection challenge. I decided to take a break because I really haven’t been watching as many movies and my Director’s Roulette game kind of fell apart. I wasn’t really intending to blog for the remainder of the month but something has kind of grabbed me and shook me into feeling the need for a post.

That thing is Netflix.

My blog kind of runs on Netflix – as their wide selection of titles lets me jump all over the genre maps to find interesting things to blog about. Netflix has decided from a business point of view to push people into streaming their movies by putting in 60% price increases on DVD rentals. As angry as this makes me – I get it - it makes sense for a business cost perspective (and if it’s one thing I have grown to appreciate in my job – it is costs and margins).

A while ago – I posted about how their prices were too high for the usage I was getting out of them and that I wasn’t watching the films on my shelves as much anymore – so I cut back. Now, with the prices going up yet again – and me worrying about cutting my personal costs – I’ve decided that I once again need to cut back because it doesn’t make sense to keep paying higher prices for the exact same services.

I was comfortable with cutting back to just streaming movies to my Wii or XBOX - until last night. I went through my queues and found that on my streaming list I had roughly 110 movies that I was interested in that are available to stream – and then I cut all those off my DVD queue and I still had nearly 325 films on that DVD queue that I was going to part ways with.

Gone were all the Jess Franco films – save one. Gone were all the Italian and early American exploitation films. Gone were some classic films that I had really wanted to catch up to such as; Once Upon a Time in the West, Gold Rush, City Lights, Vertigo, Notorious, all the old Universal monster movies, Solaris, The Seventh Seal, almost every Akira Kurosawa film, Broadcast News, Videodrome… And new releases? You can forget those too! So, all the summer movies I said I’d wait until the DVD – can’t rent them anymore either.

My selection of the unique and interesting films that I’m drawn to has dwindled down to nearly nothing. This will in effect ruin the way that I blog – unless I want to pay the premium for having movies delivered to me – which is bullshit.

I have a passion for used DVD shops – and I could set my budget to go out and get a few titles every month and effectively save money – but I’m at the mercy of finding interesting titles to purchase. I’m also not keen on adding more to my library – but that could get me back into the internet swapping community – which has netted me far more interesting titles than I have been able to find at the stores.

Just because Netflix beat Blockbuster doesn’t mean they get to steal Blockbuster’s old company philosophy and jack up the prices at will and mistreat their core customers by putting fees on everything. If history has shown us anything in business the consumer remembers when a company habitually mistreats their customers – and when a young upstart with a fresh face comes in and starts treating the consumer better – there will be no sympathy for the giant who’s suddenly crying out.

Just ask Blockbuster.

Oh wait… You can’t…

No comments:

Post a Comment