Netflix and the Queue of Remorse

Netflix announced this week that it is doing away with its "multiple profile" feature. You can read about here and here. This feature allowed for multiple lists of movies to be kept under the same account, and enabled account holders to determine how many movies from each separate queue were to be sent each month. This feature keeps Beren and me from killing each other, and we invested significant time in creating our own separate queues.

Needless to say, I think doing away with this feature is a terrible idea. And the way they are doing it—simply deleting the secondary queues and not offering descriptions of the “beneficial features” that are leading to this decision—seems unwise. But all day I've been trying to figure out Netflix's motivation for this decision. They claim that the feature is used by only 2% of their 8.5 million users (170,000 users), that it was confusing and cumbersome to folks, and that they'd rather focus their resources on other features that will be of interest to a larger proportion of users. Most of their answers rang hollow to me. The feature was so useful, why not fix the human factors impediments to wider adoption?

So, what is the business case for making this decision? This is clearly a very small risk for them; 98% of Netflix users won’t notice a change, and only a small minority of the remaining 2% will be so irked by this decision that they will cancel their account. Sure, they’ll have alienated a passionate bunch, but the loss is small – say .25% to be generous. Where else will these folks go? I can imagine the market researcher pointing out that there is a very large number of potential users who are scared by Netflix’s current interface and features, and that a proportion of these users would likely become members if the interface was simplified and pared down. So, a net gain of members.

But the message Beren and I received from Netflix today was “we don’t value your patronage, and we won’t be working to meet your needs.” We will be leaving Netflix come August 30^th, and if I worked for Blockbuster, I’d be trying to figure out how to woo disaffected Netflix members between now and then.