Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Dear Blockbuster,

I no longer find your service to meet my needs. I expressly chose you over Netflix because I could exchange DVD's in the store and while the next items in my queue were shipping, I would have something to watch. I don't have a cable TV subscription and thus watch a lot of movies and TV on DVD. Your new policy of counting my store rentals against my total number of rentals and not shipping the next items in my queue until they're returned defeats the purpose of subscribing to your service. Netflix is less expensive per month, has free streaming with their unlimited plan that works with Linux, and has faster DVD turn around rates (anecdotal evidence from nearby friends with Netflix). The cure for bad service is not worse service. I will be cancelling my subscription with you as soon as I figure out how to migrate my queue to Netflix.

So long,

Adam

PS:
Lazy web - So far I've found no easy way to migrate my queue from one to the other. Please let me know if you know of one.

Netflix - If you're listening, other Blockbuster Total Access members that heard this policy explained to them in the stored sounded just as peeved. You could have a windfall if you provided an easy way to import my queue from blockbuster, say CSV or such.

Update: The streaming doesn't work on Linux as I've now found out. mea culpa.

9 comments:

qhartman said...

Netflix streaming works with Linux? Since when? It doesn't work for me. It might have worked when the WMV-based streams were available, but the current Silverlight-based player does not work.

If you're relying on outdated information, I hate to burst your bubble. If you know of a way to get the current player working in Linux, please share!!!

Unknown said...

I concur with qhartman. Perhaps once moonlight 2.0 is out you'll be able to do a little user-agent hackery and get it to work, but I don't think that is coming in the immediate future.

Adam said...

From everything I've read you can use Boxee to watch instant video downloads from Netflix.

http://www.deviceguru.com/boxee-adds-netflix-movie-downloads/

Aaron said...

Unfortunately, I was tricked by this marketing as well.... It doesn't work, I tried. I signed up for boxee for solely this service, just to find that it didn't work.

http://forum.boxee.tv/showthread.php?t=3385

Ricky said...

boxee NEVER claimed that Netflix streaming worked in GNU/Linux. Bad reporting by many tech websites (and blogs like this one) unfortunately led a lot of people to think that it does, obviously without even trying it themselves.

Adam said...

Ricky, Aarron,

You're right I suppose it doesn't.

Ricky: I resent the "blogs like this one" comment. I made an honest mistake because I obviously can't try it until I've switched services.

Ricky said...

what is there to resent? you stated something as fact that was incorrect. you admitted that mistake and quickly made the appropriate change. what I am saying is that A LOT of blogs did that, unfortunately. deviceguru.com was made aware of their mistake (in the comments of the link you posted) and still haven't corrected themselves. i hope in the future that everyone will get boxee news directly from boxee: http://blog.boxee.tv/2008/12/04/boxee/

physicow said...

Moonlight 2 will be of no help, as the streaming service still uses MSFT's DRM, and the MSFT-provided codecs for Moonlight 1 don't provide DRM support. Nor does the current agreement indicate that Moonlight beyond v1.1 will have MSFT-provided codec support.

Anarimus said...

Google Chrome OS supposedly works with Netflix now (new version only). Rumor has it Google wants Netflix to stream using open technology to attract more people to Chromebooks and is willing to help Netflix do this.