Netflix Angers Customers, Good News for Hulu, Amazon

Public outrage has been and continues to be voiced over Netflix’s recent price-hike and the separation of its instant streaming service and DVD shipping service into two individual subscription plans.

Many users have expressed their discontent over the issue in comments on Netflix’s official blog, which has received over 9,000 comments, and Netflix’s official Facebook page, which has received over 44,000 comments. Predictably, the vast majority of the comments on both pages are negative.

One major issue that has been pointed out in recurring comments is the instant streaming feature’s lack of full access to the complete library of Netflix’s movies. Although this may be due to licensing rights and the inability to obtain certain contracts from producers, some users feel Netflix is taking unfair advantage of the situation by forcing instant subscribers to purchase an additional DVD subscription or vice versa, what once came as one package at lower rates starting from $9.99, now $16 at the cheapest.

This outrage comes as a significant turn for what used to be a company that was ranked extremely well in customer satisfaction according to surveys conducted by Foresee Results last year.

Many users have threatened to leave. Others have already left. Some comments advise others to switch to other subscription-based services, like Hulu Plus or Amazon Prime.

Both alternative services offer a smaller total selection of movies, but are cheaper for their value.
Hulu Plus is a premium subscription-based version of the free basic Hulu, a joint advertisement-funded instant-streaming project between NBCUniversal, Fox Entertainment Group, and Disney-ABC Television Group. Hulu Plus offers full unlimited instant access to its entire library of movies and shows in high definition for $7.99 a month.

Its library contains over a thousand Criterion Collection movies and full current seasons of numerous popular television shows with complete series runs for many others, however even their premium content will have advertisement in order to, according to the Hulu website, “reduce the monthly subscription price of the service.”

Amazon.com’s Amazon Prime subscription service allows users to access commercial-free unlimited instant streaming for a considerable 6,000 movies and television shows from Amazon’s vast collection of content in addition to free 2-day shipping for certain products purchased from the retailer’s website, all for $79 a year, or about $6.60 a month. Amazon Prime will only allow a user to watch certain movies and shows for free however, and the bulk of Amazon’s 90,000 instant streaming selections are only available through pay-per-view.

Amazon Prime also offers more new releases for instant streaming view than Netflix, despite the fact that the majority of these selections are also pay-per-view.

Kiosk DVD dispensary company Redbox announced in October of last year that it too would be offering its own online instant streaming service to roll out sometime this year. In the announcement, CEO of parent company Coinstar, Paul Davis, hinted that the “Redbox-branded” service would be provided through an unknown third-party partnership. Some rumors suggest that this partner may actually be Amazon.

Whatever the case, Netflix’s latest move is alienating many of even its most loyal members and providing nothing but good news for its numerous up-and-coming competitors, powerfully-backed entities who would certainly hope to draw away as many of Netflix’s deserters as possible.