Yes, we've known for a few months now that Netflix was probably not going to renew their Starz contract (News Link). Then they announced yesterday that everything from them would be leaving at midnight tonite...Wednesday February 29th. Well they lied. Its all gone already...and it is Wednesday morning as I write this. Not only that, it was pulled last night at midnight, so when we tried to stream Howl's Moving Castle for the last time as my daughter was getting ready for bed....it was already gone. If I were going to try and give Netflix the benefit of the doubt, I'd say...
Some programming moron over there didn't realize it was leap year, and set everything to expire the 28th instead of the 29th. But since Netflix is insulting me (and all of you), I'm not inclined to do that. What you missed the insult? How about here....
"John Hall, a graphic designer in Massachusetts, said he recently dropped the streaming service and started resorting to DVD rentals for that reason. Whenever he headed to Netflix to stream a film, he said, “more often than not, the film I wanted to see was only available on disc.”
Netflix is sensitive to that criticism — but says it doesn’t really matter. (And not just because Mr. Hall is still paying for DVDs by mail.) As long as its algorithms serve up something worth watching, even if it’s not the subscriber’s first choice, he or she will continue paying for and enjoying the service, the company believes."
That's right. Who cares if we don't have what you want to watch, as long as we give you something we think you might want to watch, you'll just watch it...because what's the alternative...you already canceled your cable.
Of the 50 top grossing movies of 2011, guess how many are on Netflix! Three. OMG OMG OMG! No wonder we don't watch movies on Netflix, THEY DON'T HAVE ANY!
And now with over 800 movies GONE, they have even less. With Starz gone pretty much everything from Disney is gone. We're left with 33 offerings from Disney now, and they'll probably vanish soon as well. Some amazing person over at TvandMoviesnow.com has compiled a list of all the movies that just left Netflix, and notes which are available via Amazon Prime
. While it is nice to see that some of these are over there, many are not. I'm hoping that with the loss of Netflix maybe Starz will shop around, and Amazon can pick them up!In a partial explanation of the move Netflix claims that the new release movies provided by Starz accounts for only 2 percent of all viewing. Well thanks for that spin Netflix, how about the numbers on the total viewing for all the rest of the Starz content you jack-wagons. They think we all want to watch old re-runs of tv shows on their service. Sure, its nice to be nostalgic, or watch a show we never watched while it was on, but I mostly have Hulu for this service, and I don't need Netflix for it. Also, all their claims are skewed like everything else. While Netflix itself won't tell us what percentage of streamers or content watched is tv shows, executives claim its over 50%. Brian Stetler in his article in the New York Times said this is:
"...an impressive triumph for TV over film."
No its not, its more marketing mumbo jumbo double-talk. Lets try this math on for size. How about last month I watched 10 movies and 2 tv-shows on Netflix. Now I could claim that movies accounted for 80% of my Netflix viewing time last month right? But in the spin machine we plug it differently. I watched all of How I Met Your Mother (136 episodes), and Lost (120 episodes) last month. So out of the 266 things I streamed, only 10 were movies, or roughly 4%. Big difference from 80%. Now if we add to that, that my kids spent all month streaming things like Danny Phantom, Avatar the Last Air-Bender, Sponge Bob... and my movie watching looks like its only about 1% of my streaming time.
Still think its not a big deal...my kids had about 300 items in the Instant Queue for streaming. That is now trimmed to 165 titles, and another 6 titles will drop off tonite. Roughly half of the things we wanted to watch are gone. Also, they've deleted that feature where it would show below my queue the list of things I had previously queued that are no longer available (but might come back), so that I can't even see exactly how many things are gone, or what they were.
So guess what Netflix, I'll finish watching the couple of shows I'm already hooked on...but then you're canceled. I'll take the $16 (streaming and one dvd) a month, which is nearly double what I was paying in August, and I'll put that money somewhere else. I'll be buying my movies online probably via Amazon. Isn't that awesome, we pay twice as much...and we get less content. At $79/year Amazon Prime costs less then Netflix, has FREE two-day shipping, and I can borrow a Kindle book. Sounds like a better deal to me.
Are you leaving, or staying, and why? Tell us in the comments! :)
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