Also, video games!
Oddly, Gamefly just launched a streaming service for the PC, so just as Gamefly is beginning the move away from discs to streaming, Netflix is moving right into that spot.
I don't think game discs have much of a long-term future, but then neither do movie discs either. I wonder if this structuring is not just so that Quikster can be killed or sold to a chump (or someone willing to settle for scaling back the business) as soon as they begin to see the tipping point on streaming.
This does not impress me quite so much.
I still have the impression that Reed isn't "getting" the two biggest complaints:
1) Customers who use both services are unhappy about losing the integration between them.
2) Quikster is a monumentally bad name
(Yes I know it's misspelled. I would look up the correct spelling, but that's exactly the point. How do you spell it without looking it up? And how exactly did they come up with the name with nobody on the team saying, "Hey, my Amway friends tell me it's not Amway any more, it's Quixtar." :-)
This has the potential to be pretty large, actually, and GameFly is pretty terrible, in my experience.
I don't think his crocodile tears now are going to win many people back, nor do I think his apology will have any effect on NFLX's course of action. Promising better communication but not having all the facts about how your spun off service is going to work doesn't lend much credit to his original apology. They should be bending over backwards to make sure that customers who are affected will have an easy transition. Though if this is a move to jettison those customers off onto a 3rd party buyer, then this will have been nothing more than Hastings proving he's a hypocrite.
And Netflix streaming is not ready to carry Netflix forward. We won't be subscribing to Qwikster, and we're already looking for alternatives on the streaming side -- most likely, Amazon, who would never do something this idiotic.
It is times like this when a company needs leadership and that isn't an executive team afraid to share their vision and apologize when needed directly to customers themselves.
Could they be "using their time better"? I firmly believe, no they can't. Having real interaction with customers on their terms keeps them grounded. Many executive teams end up drinking Kool-aid(tm) by only taking customer meetings hand picked to show "how good we're doing" by their teams -- every business has at least one happy customer.