Pulp Free

A few nights ago we were enjoying our latest Netflix rental and came to a scene in Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs where the lead character, Flint Lockwood, builds a flying car to help save the town from his run away invention. Upon starting up the car and pulling it out of his laboratory, you see the license plate flash into neon-life… The rest speaks for itself…

In case you can’t read the license plate, I blew up the image and pasted it in the top left hand corner…

“AWESOME”

Right on…

Looks like my signature on the online petition to keep Netflix profiles around finally paid off! Well – probably mine and thousands of others (along with the numerous online discussions and posts like mine…) While this message came to light on Monday (I was traveling and not able to make a cool image for this post until I got back home…) – Netflix has reversed their decision to drop the profiles functionality from their Web site.

I can only hope this decision won’t cause their Web site to crash… Being that the first decision to do away with such a useful feature was for the overall improvement of such said Web site.

At least this time it came from my friends at Netflix rather than just the “team” at Netflix.

As it’s probably no surprise by now, I both hate Netflix and love them all at the same time. It’s similar to my relationship with Best Buy except that I don’t spend as much money with Netflix. Today I received a nice email stating that their profiles were going away in order to improve their Web site.

C and I actually love this feature. She gets to put DVDs in her queue, I put DVDs in my queue… Separate but very manageable. Heck – even her name shows up on the address label! I have to wonder what Netflix is doing to keep customers around? It’s not that I’m going to pack up and head to Blockbuster over this, but why take out features that users actually enjoy and use? (Thankfully having an AJAX enabled queue management system isn’t going away any time soon! I mean, using numbers to re-order your queue was a real pain in the… well – you know…)

I also thought it very clever for Netflix to place tracker information for anybody that clicked on the FAQ link… Maybe if I call the phone number, they can get my Caller ID as well…

It’s also good to see that others are a bit touched off by this as well… A quick few minutes on Google turned up another happy customer…

I’ve been a member of Netflix since the time of caves and torches. I love the service… Dropping movies into my queue so that I don’t have to remember what I want to watch keeps my head clear for other, more important thoughts. However, lately – Netflix seems to be slowly less interested in keeping me happy. You see – I think I’ve been unprofitable to them. I essentially watch too many DVDs. How did I come to this confusion? I haven’t had a single movie ship from my queue in almost a week. Curious about this behavior – I Googled a few choice keywords and found Web sites have done calculations pinpointing such a phenomenon.

To save you from my own dribble – check on the background of such an unfortunate realization on these Web sites: Essentially:

• Tip For Beating Netlix Throttle
• Frequent Netflix Renters Sent To Back Of The Line
• Manuel Villanueva – My Opinion Of Netflix
• Netflix Customer Support On Throttling

So what am I waiting on? Something so esoteric that Netflix probably only has one copy of a DVD? Naaaa… Movies like The Bourne Ultimatum and Shrek the Third.

What annoys me the most is that I’ve had Bourne Ultimatum on my “Saved” movies queue since I heard it was coming out. It’s number 1 on my list and I’ve been sitting waiting for it to ship. Now perhaps since I have it listed as HD DVD it might be taking longer? But c’mon. People are waiting and Netflix can’t pick up a few more copies of a popular movie almost a month since it came out? Ugh.

I’ve only rented 14 movies in the last 30 days… And most of those only came from the bottom of my queue… I’m waiting a few more days with open slots until I’m pegged to cancel this membership… How in the world can I have unlimited movie rentals when my queue is full and Netflix isn’t shipping any movies? So I’m waiting now… to see when the first movie of 10 ship…

(Oops! Forgot to add my throttled tag…)