It's not just prioritizing videos, it's prioritizing the line. Somebody or something has to stick that DVD in the envelope and stick your address on the front and put it in the bucket to send. By the simple logic of reality that somebody or something has a limited number of units they can ship in one day, so they have to decide which customer's units should get the higher priority and therefore the highest chance for same day service and who should be at the back of the line and possibly have to wait a day.
And it is disclosed, it's in the terms of service.
It's exactly the same thing as triaging patients. You have a limited labor capacity and a quantity of labor to do that might or might not exceed your labor capacity, so you need to prioritize the labor deciding which customers need to be served first, second, third, and maybe tomorrow.
Until recently (according to the article we are presumably posting about) it was not disclosed that people were being selected for slowdown. Nowhere does it say that this was due to limited supply of workers! This was only to limit costs of mailings. They disclosed because they got caught -- like Bill after semen was found on Monica's dress.
Anyway I have a food bar idea for you - a separate line for FAT people with limited replacement of food in their bins. But advertise unlimited salad bar for all! This way you stay profitable, you can have the dressed cleaned of all traces, and nobody's the wiser.
but triaging in hospitals is (hopefully) not being done based on how often the service is used. if hospitals did that, they might get into serious trouble.
now that netflix has disclosed what they are doing, there is no real problem. the problem was back when they didn't disclose, and simply delayed the turn around.
how about if we all had a credit card that would slow down payments to "frequent billers" without disclosing. then we could use it to buy products and services from your business. you would be out of business before you ever collected the money owed to you.