Quick end for Qwikster

By The Beacon | October 26, 2011 9:00pm

With customers quickly losing patience with price increases and services changes, Netflix reverts to its old model

By

Netflix, the video rental and streaming service popular among UP students, has changed its mind about recently-announced, unpopular changes. But its' still losing thousands of customers.

On Oct. 25, Netflix Co. released its 3rd quarter earnings and statistics, revealing a loss of 800,000 subscribers in the U.S. The subscription loss immediately prompted a 37 percent decrease in stock Tuesday according to Reuters, a news agency.

Analysts had originally predicted an increase of 300,000 subscribers for this quarter, according to Bloomberg Market News, but recent price and service changes made many customers nix Netflix.

On Oct. 10, Netflix Co. reversed its previous decision to split its online streaming and mail-in DVD services, causing the most recent wave of criticism.

The reversal came after heated customer complaints over increased web management by Netflix users.

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings announced the switch on the company's blog.

"It is clear that for many of our members two websites would make things more difficult, so we are going to keep Netflix as one place to go for streaming and DVDs," Hastings wrote. "This means no change: one website, one account, one password ... in other words, no Qwikster."

With Qwikster scrapped, Netflix users now have to decide whether or not to keep the packaged deal of both instant streaming and mail-in DVDs which costs about $16, an increase from their original price of $10, or select one service or the other at $7.99 each.

Netflix's stock has now fallen over 75 percent since July when the service separation and price increases began.


B