(1) Raising the price of your streaming service because Hollywood is ratcheting up the licensing fees for their content by 1,000% (or more) is just the sad reality of doing business. And customers who can’t understand that just aren’t being rational.
(2) With that being said, trying to sell a price hike to your customers as actually being a great thing for them was a pretty stupid thing to do. The better approach would have been to be frank about the realities of what was going on: “Look, we have to raise the price you’re paying because Hollywood is raising the price we’re paying. What we’re going to do, though, is give you more control over how much you’re paying by letting you pay for just the services you want. If the new price Hollywood is demanding for streaming content is too high, then you can cut back to just disc delivery.”
After fumbling the initial delivery, your best bet would have been to offer your customers (including those who recently canceled) a 3- or 6-month discount as an apology while offering a more coherent and honest explanation of what was happening.
(3) What you really, really shouldn’t do is try to somehow “make up” for your previous mistake by splitting your service into two different companies which will not share queues, ratings, recommendations, or billing. That’s a plan which significantly reduces the utility of your service for your customers.
(4) The only thing stupider than that would be if you split the service, reduce the value of the service to your customers, and then pretend that this is all supposed to somehow be a great thing for them.
I mean that would be really, really stupid. That would be making the exact same mistake you just got raked over the coals for just a couple weeks ago.
… oh dear.
I actually look at the price increase and shrugged: It was more expensive (although nobody’s price “doubled” despite the ridiculous rhetoric posted by the math-challenged; and unless you were already in their lowest possible tier of service the hike was not outrageously large), but I was still getting a ton of value for the price they were asking.
But the split in services? It’s almost certainly going to result in me canceling at least one of the services.
Games Workshop just did something similar. They have given up on casting their miniatures in metal and have switched to resin. Instead of coming clean and telling us that the volatile price of metal meant having to change to inferior resins, they touted this “revolutionary” new product as being superior and charged even more money for it. Forgeworld have been casting special GW products out of resin for 15 years and the results are always inferior and often unusable. This “new” process, dubbed “Finecast” has been equally dismal. Voids, bubbles, and warped pieces are present in every figure which now cost more than their previously metal incarnations.
The gall to hype this blatant cheapening of their product into something greater than the original, and then charge more for it is appalling. We are all aware that outside market forces (rising cost of metal or losing streaming content in Netflix’s case) can cause price increases, just be honest about it.
Games Workshop has alienated another segment of their customer base yet again, but the company continues to serve the Kool-Aid and drink it as well. At least Netflix has realized their mistake, despite a flawed attempt to rectify it.
Ha, what was so disenherteaning about it is that GW spent so many years talking about how much cheaper the new plastics would be over their super expensive metals, and now they are more expensive than the old metal products. Some of the assembly required on those Finecast pieces is also unbelievable, too, compared to earlier plastic miniatures. I suppose the instinctive desire to spin things in a good light may be hard to suppress, and it’s hard to tell when honesty would actually serve a company better.
Netflix raising their prices and crapping all over customers?
*shrugs*
*goes back to Piratebay*