Posted on 10/10/2011 5:41:23 AM PDT by TSgt
Abandoning a break-up plan it announced last month, Netflix said Monday morning that it had decided to keep its DVD-by-mail and online streaming services together under one name and one Web site.
The company admitted that it had moved too fast when it tried to spin-off the old-fashioned DVD service into a new company called Qwikster.
“We underestimated the appeal of the single web site and a single service,” Steve Swasey, a Netflix spokesman, said in a telephone interview. He quickly added: “We greatly underestimated it.”
Mr. Swasey said that the Netflix chief executive Reed Hastings declined an interview request. But in a statement, Mr. Hastings said, “Consumers value the simplicity Netflix has always offered and we respect that. There is a difference between moving quickly — which Netflix has done very well for years — and moving too fast, which is what we did in this case.”
(Excerpt) Read more at mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com ...
I’ve looked all through the Channel Store and I simply can’t find the Youtube app. My Roku was purchased back in May and they have since come out with a Roku 2 series. Is that what you have? Perhaps that is the difference. If so, and they don’t make the app available to previous owners they’ve lost a customer that way as well.
Use sites like CNet.com for reviews on home electronics. They’re quite reputable, and I’ve never been dissatisfied by a product I’ve researched and purchased at the recommendation of CNet editors and readers.
You won’t be disappointed by Samsung, and even with a 100 MBps Linksys wireless router, you’ll still be able to stream from NetFlix with little issue.
Thanks. My Linksys E2500 is rated up to 300Mbps so I shouldn’t have a problem.
MW is exactly as you dexcribed it, pvp for mostly solo players. I like it because I can drop in and out for as long as I want and just kinda blow off some steam.
I’ve been playing Tropico 4 quite a bit recently. I had played Civ too many turns and needed something new. I DL’d the Steam app and have been keeping a close eye on their specials. I’d like to get Shogun 2 on sale . I played the demo and fell in love all over again. I played the org. way back and have played most of the TW series.
EA pisses me off soooo much sometimes. I hate their executive team.
I prefer cooperative game play if I can get it. I played WoW for 4 years, and I absolutely loved the late-game content. Going into a raid with 40 people and just pwning a big dragon was just plain fun. The guild drama pushed me away from WoW, though.
How is Tropico 4? Did you play the original? I STILL fire up the original Tropico on occasion. I could get lost in it for hours!
I have heard good things about Mass Effect. I plan on picking that up on Steam when its on sale again. My wish list on Steam is just ridiculous!
I wish EA would go the Steam route. Part of my hesitancy with BF3 is that you are required to keep Origin running while playing. I do not know if you messed with their old EA Download Manager, but what a freaking PIG!
I wound up editing my registry so I could play my games without EADM running, but that took some time and effort. I hope I can do the same with BF3, but I am not hopeful. And word is that Origin actually tracks you and provides information back to EA.
I hate DRM!
Dang. I wonder if they will roll back the pricing now too.
Actually new coke was a marketing success. Sales had been dropping, while the change was poorly received it spawned a wave of brand loyalty that increased sales quite dramatically.
I don’t know if this will play out quite like that, but it does show that the epitaph for the DVD has been written a bit too soon. It also shows people shouldn’t get so worked up all the time. In the end none of what people were whining about came to pass, so they got their blood pressure all spiked up for nothing.
Origin = horribad
Trop 4 = win
When I bought Trop Steam gave me all the other titles + expacs.
I was very happy with that deal because I played the pirates one while waiting for the release of #4.
My wife and I played WoW from Beta to Cata. Eventually I knew the game so well I felt like I was playing a spreadsheet. I did hear that there would be no TITAN announcement at BlizzCon. So that sucks.
I hope that when ME III comes out that Steam will sell it in a battlechest with the first 2 titles so I can get the true experience of watching all of my decisions effect the end game.
And I agree DRM is the enemy of Liberty!
For $5 or $10 you can buy older movies. And since the old stuff tends to be better than the hottest new release from Hollywood, we've given up rentals completely.
This is the story of how Netflix nearly saved Blockbuster.
The only way the price hike is getting revoked is if companies they get streaming content from revoke THEIR price hike. Netflix’s costs went up nearly 2 billion dollars in a few months, they had to pass those costs to the consumer.
I’ve got Trop4 in my wish list, but since I’ll be unemployed as of Halloween, I’m trying to pick and choose what I buy. I hope it comes down in price, because I loved the first one. BTW, was there a Tropico 2 & 3? How’d they get to 4?
I never played Cataclysm. I played through a small part of the Frozen Throne exp, but I dropped out of WoW altogether when they announced Cata. I played Beta, and boy is the game completely different from the original experience. Also, now that they’re letting everyone play for free up through lvl 20, I have to imagine the Chinese farmers must be EVERYWHERE!
You play SCII? I need help. As much as I love RTS games, I’m no where near as good with build order and offense as some of these other kids. I guess I’ll take my single-player Civ and SimCity games and enjoy a day of mindless fun instead of mindboggling frustration.
Go wired if you can. Network cables almost always give you faster cleaner throughput than wireless. I’ve got the Samsung BD-C6500. My only complaint about the unit is that sometimes when it turns on it gets “confused” and you have to turn it back off and on. Luckily it only does that on bootup. Oh and updates only ever seem to show up at inconvenient time (”ooh I’ve got an hour to kill let’s watch this thing that’s 56 minutes... crap updates that take 10 minutes so much for that”), but that’s just a universal truth for everything these days.
Nope. I have a Roku 1.
“Did not come to pass”? A million disc rental customers quit renting discs - prematurely. Sure, Netflix is doing an about-face, but 7 digits of people have now given up physical movie media outright. Between the kids destroying discs and me sampling “anything, now, for at most a few bucks” I’m dropping discs outright, along with a lot of others.
This along with a new generation used to not possessing physical media. Had a lunchroom chat with co-workers about the future influence of CDs: one looked on a bit puzzled for a while, then observed she hadn’t purchased any CDs for 10 years - all music obtained by paid downloads. Likewise, discs (DVD, BluRay, NextUberFormatHere) will pass as instant cheap access will be preferred, accentuated by the realization few people watch any given movie/show more than once or twice, cheaper to rent and easier to not store.
Looking more like an analogy where Coke convinced a vast segment of their customers that water was better & cheaper.
Yep, that’s the reason I had figured they would split the service and then do away with the streaming side of it. My theory was wrong.
That was more tied to the price hike than anything. Which is actually OK in Netflix’s book. The whole plan for them has always been to be all streaming eventually, discs are incredibly expensive on every level for them, buying them, sorting them, mailing them, buying them again when they get damaged. The primary reason they even considered the qwikster thing was because people weren’t fleeing from the DVDs fast enough. All this thing really proved is that this thing they always planned to be temporary has more life in it than they hoped, but with the new prices things stay profitable.
Discs still have some stuff to draw people to them. Not the least of which is permanence. With the vagueries of the streaming world the movie you want to watch might not be available when you want it. You own an MP3 even if you didn’t get it from a CD, you don’t own the stream. As anybody watching a Starz series on Netflix has learned, if your stream provider and the distributor decide they aren’t getting along anymore you’re SOL. Where as people who owned their favorite Starz series didn’t care, they owned it.
Actually bottled water is more expensive than coke, but it’s OK because the biggest bottled water brands on the shelf are all owned by coke. Go ahead and stop drinking coke because dasani is healthier, the boys in Atlanta don’t mind.
re: Nope. I have a Roku 1.
Then I have no idea how you can see a Youtube app in the Channel Store and I can’t. Are you sure you didn’t get the private channel hack that was available back in 2010 before it was withdrawn at Youtube’s demand?
They were never going to drop the streaming side. Streaming is the goal of the company, and has been since its founding. The DVD side was just there to get them the funding and profile needed to become a streaming company. That’s why they called it NETflix not DVDMail. The spinoff was about getting rid of this thing that wasn’t dieing fast enough, then there was all the complaints. But the goal still is to be stream only, as soon as their “funding” portion dies the death they thought it was going to already.
We’re wireless also. We had to get a samsung compatible wireless antenna thingy that plugs into the front of the Samsung. Not sure, but I think maybe the newer units have that integrated into it. Ours is a bit older, and we needed the added contraption. It all works wonderfully, though.
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