Netflix shoots its users in the foot

From Brendan's blog:

Dear Brendan,

We wanted to let you know we will be eliminating Profiles, the feature that allowed you to set up separate DVD Queues under one account, effective September 1, 2008.

Each additional Profile Queue will be unavailable after September 1, 2008. Before then, we recommend you consolidate any of your Profile Queues to your main account Queue or print them out.

While it may be disappointing to see Profiles go away, this change will help us continue to improve the Netflix website for all our customers.

Dear Netflix,

DO NOT ELIMINATE PROFILES.

Profiles are a great way for a family with multiple viewing habits and preferences to use your service. Eliminating it is a terrible idea. I’m particularly annoyed that your reason is “to make the site easier to use.” This will patently NOT be the case for my family or for friends of mine who use the profile service.

This is a terrible idea and greatly diminishes the convenience of your service for my family. Eliminating a service should only be done with the most careful consideration, and as someone who uses the profile service, I’ve seen no questionnaires or discussion of this.

Strongly disappointed.
Brendan

I'm so glad Brendan put this up on his blog. We'd completely missed it, as the email to us from netflix was in the spam filter of my wife's lesser-used (non-work) account.

My wife and I use the "profiles" system on Netflix. This allows us each our own queue, so we don't have to alternate who gets to choose the next movie. That alone is what makes netflix work for us as our primary video source - it's no hassle, no disagreements over what's getting rented, etc, thereby making netflix worth the occasional delays via the mail. Without it, Netflix will stop being a service we happily recommend to friends, and may even result in us going back to cable or rental stores.

Just as frustrating is that when we lose our secondary profiles, we'll lose not just the queue, but also my ratings. You have the ability to rate films from 1 to 5 stars, and my wife and I frequently disagree on films by 1 to 2 stars. Netflix uses these ratings to make suggestions to you. Sometimes the suggestions are crazy, but 95% of the time they're on the mark. When my queue goes away, that information will be lost. It will no longer be able to predict which films I'll like but my wife will hate, and vice versa.

There's ways around that - but they involve building a second account, and then spending hours manually entering all several hundred ratings all over again. I'll also have to reset my friends/community settings on a new account - according to the FAQ it will delete my current friend connections. And since those friends will also be losing their profiles, it's going to be a headache to set that up. The FAQ has nothing to say about whether or not the reviews I've written will remain accessible, or if that will be lost as well.

Speaking of lost data, I wonder how deleting all these profiles and the associated ratings is going to skew the ratings of films - I imagine primary accounts are typically the head of household, and secondary profiles are where the kids are stored. The average age of raters will suddenly jump up, which may or may not be a bad thing, depending on your point of view.

One last bitch: many apartment complexes offer "free" cable - which means you're paying more in rent, but typically not as much more as if you got cable yourself individually. My wife and I just signed a lease at a new place. We specifically looked for one without cable, to save money, since netflix covers all the TV we really need. Now here I am, just two weeks later, wishing we'd gotten an apartment with free cable so that I could ditch netflix. Bastards!